Tofu Hut likes hippos

I was in the waiting room last winter at the Jiffy Lube on Rt. 40 waiting while they flushed the entire contents of my car's lube system. I hadn't changed the oil since Meg and I drove to South Dakota and that is apparently not very healthy for the car (it had been a good 10,000 miles since). And while I was waiting to pony up $150 for them to restore my system back to normalcy I had picked up a Newsweek and picked through it.

That's where I first read about Tofu Hut. The whole MP3 blog thing, or blog thing in general, was a mystery to me but a chance to hear something I might not otherwise hear or find a band that would become the next object of obsession sounded pretty good.

Tofu Hut seems to have gone through some changes in the last year; make of it what you will. The Blogroll on it remains the most extensive list of MP3 blogs that I've seen and it is great picking through the sites when you've got time to kill or a couple of free useless gigabytes of memory on your computer to fill up (of which I don't) with all manner of music (or sometimes noise).

In January's post (and at this point in time it remains the most recent post) Tofu Hut links The Caretaker's Diary which chronicles the care of a baby hippo (Owen) torn from it's mother in the 2004 tsunami. Owen was paired with a giant 100-some-odd-year-old tortoise (Mzee) and the two have actually bonded. The chronology on the site can make the story a little difficult to follow at first so here's a link to the first entries. The actual first entry is second from the bottom of the page and starts:

Today is a day that I will never forget. I was at the hospital getting treatment when my phone rang. Only my boss Sabine Baer would call me during the holiday. I knew it must be important.

'Stephen, we have to rescue a baby hippo, can you come?'

Once you get reading it's hard to stop and then you'll figure out the chronology thing on your own because you'll want to know what comes next. Great story.