TFT'B: The STOOPIT, etc

From the 'Book this morning comes news that formerly celebrated SNL blonde/airhead/ditz Victoria Jackson showed up on some cabloid show to be shocked and sickened by the inclusion of a boy-on-boy kiss on the hit (?) TV show, "Glee."

Apparently Victoria NEEDED to expand her bulk and balloon to two or three times her previous mass in order to accomodate all the fucking STOOPIT she now packs around with her bible...


The Lottery

In a post by Inge S on the 'Book today, there was this piece from the NYT, the hed of which inquires (or demands):

Rising Wealth Inequality: Should We Care?
Why do Americans seem unperturbed about the growing gap between the rich and the poor?

This appears to be a running hed for an ao-going feature. Chrystia Freeland who is is the global editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters, answers with an essay entitled "The Lottery Mentality," at the end of which (and with fairly short shrift actually given to the idea of the lottery, she concludes that, yes, this much inequality IS bad for us because the occasional winner obscures the reality of the zero-sum game. As disappointingly sparse as her allusion to the lottery was, it still bestirred in me these musings:

In the argot of WW II, among the grunts (according to the novelists and archivists), and in every conflict since, there has existed what was known as the "million-dollar wound." That's a hit bad enough to send you home but not to leave you tooo fucked up. Getting shot or blown up just a little is definitely a crap-shoot, a mortal lottery you started playing when they put you into that first, ill-fitting shroud they called a uniform.

And I think that, other than literally winning a lottery, the most one can hope for is to be struck by accident, and not tooo badly fucked up by deep pockets.
Izzat a "lottery?"

... That, by the way, is the origin of the phrase, shooting oneself in the foot. That was almost an infallible ticket home, an infantryman injured in the foot is useless. So, the record shows a not insignificant number of soldiers who suffered "accidental" foot wounds. It's taking a certain injury to avoid the large possibility of worse injury and/or death. Kinda like Pascal's wager for grunts.