So... it's essentially synonymous with "lucky bastard" ?

Was lucky Jim so lucky that the title could have been Jammy Jim? In other words, just how jammy was Jim?

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.

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!

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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.