Each of the doctors does a little good-luck ritual before surgery. She-Shepherd pins her wedding ring to her lapel; Burke cracks his neck; He-Shepherd repeats his little saying that it's a "beautiful day to save lives"; Bailey does a little yoga pose that I am naming "Flavasana." But today these rituals apparently are as effective as, say, the "rhythm method" of birth control, because not two minutes into the show and four patients are dead.

The interns discuss this disaster in the locker room. Izzie says the morgue guy told her that deaths come in threes or sevens, so they should expect an additional three before the day is out. Cristina calls horseshit on that. George, for his part, continues to make a show of avoiding Meredith, which frankly is getting really old. Before long, Bailey calls them all to the E.R. to await new patients.

In the hall, She-Shepherd is dispensing good luck—in the form of hot chocolate, rather than the more "adult" services one might have expected from the resident ADULTERESS—to the doctors and interns. She refers to these these good luck tokens via the West African term "juju," injecting a much-needed note of ethnic and racial diversity to a show that was, until now, desperately lacking in that regard. She-Shepherd even gives one to Meredith, as a token of goodwill and shared sexual experiences. He-Shepherd notes his wife's generosity and says he certainly isn't planning on being that generous to Mark Sloan.

Meredith, the ungrateful little hussy, takes one sip of the cocoa-juju and throws it out. Burke, meanwhile, is freaking out because the hospital laundry has lost his good-luck African-flava-pattern surgical caps. Webber warns him that, superstition or not, there's no way Burke is gonna delay surgeries just cause his Nelson Mandela collection is still in the wash.

As the interns wait around for patients, Cristina notes that it's "dead quiet," which prompts an immediate dubious-black-woman threat response from Dr. Bailey. Izzie says that declaring a hospital "quiet" is as bad as uttering the cursèd name "Macbeth" in a theater—but in a nod to her Twinkies-and-NASCAR upbringing she pronounces it "theAYter." She would make a great Daisy Mae Scraggs whenever they cast the inevitable Li'l Abner remake.