Python vs Ruby holy war thread

Last week I learned Python. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn cool.
This week I'm starting on Ruby. I've just encountered blocks and I would approve if someone would answer this: are blocks merely an ugly kludge because the author did not know about lambda expressions, or can they do something lambdas can't?

I don't like the |name| notation for block arguments. It looks somewhat like an absolute value but has no place there. :(