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Carpal Tunnel
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LONDON (Reuters) - A teen-ager with a criminal record has scooped nearly 10 million pounds ($15 million) playing Britain's national lottery on his first try, newspapers reported Tuesday.
At a conference organized by lottery company Camelot, Michael Carroll, 19, said he had never played the lottery before but on a whim decided to buy two "lucky dips" which netted him a 9.7 million pounds jackpot.
Carroll, who was recently released from jail and still has to wear a court-ordered electronic tag so police can monitor his whereabouts, said he was now going to mend his crooked ways. "I was like any normal teen-ager and made a few mistakes," he was reported as saying in the Daily Telegraph. "But that's all changed now. It won't happen again."
Carroll's win has prompted a furious response from some tabloid newspapers -- the Daily Star branded him a "Jammy Git" and the Sun called for convicted criminals to be banned from playing the lottery.
What the heck is a Jammy Git? I'm guessing that jammy in some ways refers to jam, but I'm certainly not sure.
It's certainly amusing what those papers will do to drum up circulation!
TEd
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old hand
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hey TEd, will an answer from a Canuck (who is deeply in touch with her British roots) do?!
My understanding of "jammy" is that it means "lucky," prolly because Brits do love their jam, though I'm willing to sit corrected if I'm wrong. A git is an annoying person. "Jammy" has, I believe, an additional connotation, in that someone who is jammy got lucky without really trying.
Now let's see what t'other side o' t'pond has ter say....
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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"Jammy" means unreasonably lucky, TEd. (unreasonable in the eye of the beholder, that is!  ) So far as I know - and it is infinitessimally possible that I might be wrong - it derives from the saying, "S/He's got jam on both sides of his bread." - meaing he is receiving more than his/her fair share of the good things in life. It depends on tone of voice to be really sure whether you are bitter or not about the pother persons good fortune. The Sun is undoubtedly bitter. And stupid. If it really does reform the youth ( a debatable matter, without doubt) then it is certainly to be applauded. It is far more likely, says he, cynically, that the youth will drink and drug himself into an early grave. Which The Sun no doubt will applaud. I should p oint out, for those who do not know our wonderful country, that The Sun represents all that is the worst in Britain. It is a truly dreadful newspaper. thanks for the proof-reading, AS - you'll have to come to Ireland for the Guinness, though.EDIT: Ha, curses - pipped to the post by modgod!!!  (Couldn;t have been done by a nicer person)
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Pooh-Bah
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So... it's essentially synonymous with "lucky bastard" ?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Was lucky Jim so lucky that the title could have been Jammy Jim? In other words, just how jammy was Jim?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I should pint out
Thanks, Rhuby. Make mine a Guinness.
All seriousness aside, unfortunately I know all too well what a git is. Had never heard "jammy" before, so thank you, TEd, for bringing it to our attention and thank y'all for answering his query.
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newbie
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newbie
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A similar incident occurred in the states not long ago when an illegal alien won one of the super-prize-mega-bonus-etc lottery pay-offs that make the papers. This poor guy was crossing the border to take minimum and less than minimum wage jobs in the states to support his family. Frankly, with the lottery being the sucker bet that it is, it could rightly be argued that he had no business wasting precious funds on this gamble but, in his case anyway, it paid off big.
Until, that is, word got out that he was one of (loud piano discord) "them" and suddenly there was a push on to deprive ANY illegal alien from winning ANY lottery money. The final judgment was that if the state was going to take in the funds that these people were spending on lottery tickets, then they damn well better pay out the winnings to the jammy gits (though I don't think they were referred to as such in the article I read) holding the hot tickets.
So there!
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member
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jammy has the same meaning in Oz, but recently a synonym was introduced, courtesy of Shane Warne, the famous cricketer: "arsey" (as in "you arsey c***", picked up on the wicket-cam microphone during a game)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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wicket-cam
Is that right *on the wicket? Does it get bowled over from time to time? Or is it on the sticky part of the wicket?
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old hand
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Wicket-cam
Is in the middle stump, which is hollowed out to accommodate it. One area in which the penal colony to my west truly excels is the televisual coverage of sporting events. Wicket-cam is an Aussie invention, and a truly great one too.
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old hand
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In hockey the equivalent is a net-cam. It's attached to the net right behind the goalie, so mostly you see the back of his head if he's standing still. When the Oxford Canadian dictionary came out a few years ago, it was one of the entries marked Canadian. That was fairly thrilling. I'm sure the word has gained wider usage now that hockey is also popular in the US.
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member
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Watching the World Series last month, I wondered why Foxtel doesn't have more innovative camera angles. What about a lipstick-cam mounted on the catcher's helmet? Actually to see that curve ball would be a great televisual experience for us couch potatoes. In 18ft skiff racing in Oz they have these mounted on the captain's helmet and it certainly adds to the immediacy.
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Carpal Tunnel
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This poor guy was crossing the border to take minimum and less than minimum wage jobs in the states to support his family.
What is the matter with people. Furor instead of happiness for someone's being able to make life easier for his family. I mean, c'mon, even years before the proliferation of U.S. lottery choices there were plenty of people who bet in the Irish Sweeps! And there is (or was, is it still?) a Canadian lottery that pays off in gold! My brother - a U.S. citizen) used to drive up to Montreal to buy a ticket yearly.
Sometimes I despair for the hard-heartedness displayed by people to those not exactly like themselves.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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We here i the US are sadly and sorely afflicted with an emerging conservatism thta precludes us from seeing any value in others, particularly others who are different. We are losing a part of the underlying humanity and goodness that has made the US a pretty good place to live in and a country that is pretty good to the rest of the world.
This xenophobia extends into parts of the fabric of our society that most people don't recognize. For example, the corporate culture of greed. It used to be that the greed in the American marketplace was linked directly to what was good for the shareholder. To some extent all of us are or could be shareholders.
But of late what we've seen is personal greed rising up to strangle the corporate greed. CEOs and CFOs and their cronies are now lining their own pockets at the expense of the shareholders. Enron, Global Crossing, Quest, etc. etc. ad nauseam. And this greed extends into the highest levels of our government. Bush's stock trading was, if not illegal, certainly very sleazy. And I predict that Cheney will be the second US vice president to resign in disgrace. What happened at Halliburton was almost as criminal as what went on inside Enron. And there appears to be ample indication that a subsidiary of Halliburton was the recipient of a very large government contract apparently without even bidding on it. How does stuff like this happen? Because some of us have turned away from a set of values that at least recognized the right of others to exist, and we have replaced it with a mindset in which the winner of the game is he who screws over everyone, even his own relatives.
Pretty sad.
TEd
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