Name vrs Person

Name vrs Person was Originally Posted on July 1, 2011 by lavarock

Often a friend sends me a “pass this along” item he receives in email. Most of them are false or slightly incorrect. I usually check snopes and reply wit the correct information. Today was no different.

This email was entitled “Tired at 63″ written by an ex-Marine and state senator. The email has been forwarded over time and now includes a photo and inference that the author is the famous TV actor Robert Dean Hall of CSI fame and not the actual author Robert A. Hall.

This reminds me of the game we played decades ago called “telegraph” though probably known by many names. The teacher tels the first member of a class a somewhat long story (maybe a couple of sentences). That student whispers the info to the next person who then turns and passes it along. Sometimes the recipient asks to re-hear to info but observers note that the story seems to get shorter and shorter. When the final person gets the info they tell the class what they heard. The teacher then tells the class what the original story was. The stories usually have nothing to do with each other.

I recently received an email supposedly showing a photo of Sumatra seconds before the tsunami. Careful viewing of the photo should have caused questions that the houses in the photo were in a subdivision and looked to cost over $80,000 each. There are paved streets and street lights. The towering “wave” does look like a big waterfall and might have been photoshopped in, but it was not. The “wave” is really a dust storm hitting Australia. Another clue is that in the lower right hand corner (where there USED to be a date stamp from a camera) was colored to hide that the date didn’t match.

For those wanting to see the two photos side by side, go to Snopes and search for “Sumatran Tsunami”. I can only guess that the original author wanted to see how quickly this can be spread around the world. The email with the photo *could* have contained a virus and people just happily forward these things.

With the Internet, is it possible for these types of misinformations to continue almost forever. before you forward one of these things along, try Snopes at least to see if the item is a fraud.