I don't know if anyone else has been getting the messages about the two-year-old in Phuket hospital, found near Khoa Lak. I've received them from a) a PR consultant in Brussels, b) a work colleague, c) a NATO mission in the Balkans and d) a presidential adviser in a different Balkan country (these last two only this afternoon, as people come back from Orthodox Christmas holidays I suppose).

The good news is that the child's family has indeed been identified - see http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/children/hannes.asp (not working last time I checked) and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6766709/ for more details. Unfortunately the mother is still missing.

One lesson here is that the family was actually identified as early as 29 December, and I'm still getting emails about it almost two weeks later. It's always always worth checking out such emails with a quick google to see if someone has already solved the problem. And as a general rule, if you get an email asking you to forward it to everyone you know, it is never a good idea to do so.

Bad news: Dave Barry has filed his last weekly column. (bugmenot)

Good news (for me anyway): My new copy of Dangerous Visions has arrived.

Did you hear the one about the guy who blogged about his workplace? He wrote about it here. Or you may have read about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here.

I have slightly mixed feelings. I work in a much more politically sensitive job than Joe Gordon did, so you won't read me referring to my employers in quite the way he did, even in friends-locked posts, and I'll try to avoid mentioning them explicitly at all; but at the same time, if any of my colleagues were to object to anything I'd written here, I would hope they would give me the chance to simply amend or delete in recognition of their sensibilities before they resorted to such drastic action. I think Waterstone's action has brought them into much more disrepute than anything written by Joe Gordon, and therefore I will not buy books from them in future.