Ukrainain superstitions my sister has encountered

1. After your baby is born, she is vulnerable to someone giving her the Evil Eye. Christian baptism is the only sure protection against the Evil Eye, so until your baby is baptised you must take the temporary precautionary measure of tying a red string around one of her toes.
   
2. If you are carrying an empty bucket and pass an unmarried young woman, you must turn the bucket upside down; otherwise, the woman will become infertile.

Note: These supserstitions apply to Ukraine only. Please consult local officials if you plan on carrying an empty bucket in Poland or Moldova.

What if they televised a revolution and nobody watched?

By my count (and by the count of any reputable calendar) it's been 21 days since my last post. There are three ways I can handle this, if I wish to continue writing my blog:

1. Write a post wherein I apologize to my readers for my poor blogging habits.
   
2. Ignore my poor blogging habits and continue writing as if nothing has happened.
3. Offer a free pudding cup to any reader who feels aggrieved by my poor blogging habits.

[Some would see those options and suggest that they are not mutually exclusive, to which I would respond: "I think I know how 'mutually exclusive' things work; I totally remember it from Statistical Probability 241, in which my final grade was 50% (the second time I took it)."]

I've thought about it and I've decided that the proper course of action is option #3. Also, I have a lot of pudding cups after I bought 40 of them for $10 and I really have to get rid of them because I'm getting a little sick of pudding for dinner.

If you've felt aggrieved by my poor blogging habits, please email me your name, mailing address, and whether you'd like chocolate or vanilla. One pudding cup per reader, no substitutions, void where prohibited (which I think is nowhere).

There was blood, you betcha

I went to see There Will Be Blood this morning. The text-messaging power duo sitting next to me tried their damnedest, but they could not ruin the film for me. It was great, blah blah blah.

The best part other than the ending and the beginning and vast swaths of the middle, was the preview for a new Animal Planet series called Escape to Chimp Eden. The preview was a little unclear on the specifics, but the series seems to be about stealing chimpanzees from private zoos before smuggling them to Chimp Eden, a sanctuary in South Africa. At Chimp Eden they are re-taught how to climb trees ... and that seems to be it. Maybe there are rollerskating lessons towards the end of the rehabilitation process. Fingers crossed!

There's also lots of hugging; apparently chimps never forget how to hug. It was the hugging that sold me on the show. So much hugging! And not in gay way, either. Truthfully, I'd be hard-pressed to tell a female chimp from a male, so I like to pretend that all the hugging chimps are in committed heterosexual relationships sanctified by the One True God (the Jesus one), and any incidental chimp-on-human hugging is the result of too much Communion wine.

I'd show you a clip, but I can't find a clip online and I don't get Animal Planet so I can't tape one of the commercials. Yes, I don't get Animal Planet so I can't watch this show. And you thought the chimps in private zoos had it bad.