DID YOU KNOW? The song "Hips Don't Lie" went to #1 in nearly every country that has singles charts. There are four countries where it only went to #2, and it only went to #94 in Japan. And I am SO SICK OF HEARING IT.

This is a dumb story, but scroll down for some more pictures.

I left my umbrella on a train in Switzerland last weekend. It was really a great umbrella--it had a big button that you could press to open it, fit perfectly into my small girly hands, had a comfortable strap to fit around my wrist, was compact enough to fit horizontally in my backpack when folded up, and kept the rain off of me pretty well, although the ravages of time were becoming apparent after three years of use. But anyway, I left it on a train in Switzerland.

I was worried about finding a replacement, because I got the umbrella three years ago at MIT when Shannon '05 lost my previous, much less awesome, umbrella. I was like, "Whatever, just give me 12 dollars or something," but Shannon went out to the Cambridgeside Galleria the very next day and bought me this great, top-of-the-line umbrella that I've loved ever since. So I thought that there would be a pretty big disparity between the amount of money that I was willing to spend on an umbrella and the kind of service I had come to expect from an umbrella.

With that in mind, I looked up the word for "umbrella" in Google translator and went out shopping last night. I must have looked kind of strange in the first store I went to, because I tested each umbrella I encountered according to the above five characteristics--so I opened it, held it in my hand as if it were raining indoors, dangled it by its strap from my wrist, put it in my backpack, and estimated the permeability of the material. Do most people do this when they're umbrella shopping? I mean, you would want to test-drive a car, right? There were a couple umbrellas with button-opening mechanisms, but only one even met two of my five criteria--a 10