Give a Water Buffalo

You know those gifts for poor families that you can by proxy, like where you pay for a goat for a family in an African village or something like that? Well apparently sometimes nobody actually gets a goat; the money goes into a development pool. So if you thought you were sending a direct gift, well not actually. There's a guy called Robert Thompson who lives in Yunan province in China. He's American and he went there with his Chinese partner to get married. He's also a violinist and he's doing a tour over there. Anyway he saw a story on Philip Greenspun's blog about this guy who bought a water buffalo and then realised nobody actually got a water buffalo. You can see the comment from Bob Thompson under the blog post and then you can see the resulting video (pretty professional) on Thompson's site. I came across this on Jason Kottke's site.