By early Thursday morning—hours before news that Frida Sofia isn’t real broke—speculation of deception was already high, and among the top trending topics in Mexico were “Monchito” and “Timmy O’Toole.”The first is a reference to a weeklong search—and media event—for the so-called “ghost boy” of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed more than 10,000 people exactly 32 years before this Tuesday’s quake. Like Frida Sofia, massive manpower went into the search for a boy whose body was never found and who may in fact never have existed.
And Timmy O’Toole was the name Bart Simpson used to prank his neighbors into thinking he fell down a well.
One of my favorite episodes.