Will FOIA 4 Blanton's

Plus: I’m not taking a correction on this, BUT

Another week, another fascinating little snafu wrought upon a control state by bourbon-mania, an incurable and deeply American affliction that causes divorced boat-owners—so, boat-owners—to behave like teenage sneakerheads in pursuit of brown liquor. The chaos du jour takes place in Virginia, home to both Fingers HQ and the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (VABC), which appears to have cocked-up a recent bourbon lottery with a “human-induced error” that yielded “statistically abnormal” results. Basically, a few lottery entrants won a lot of bottles of rare booze, and everybody is red-assed about it on Facebook. Reports the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

How could it be, these bourbon drinkers wondered, that two entrants had won all four bottles in a single drawing of bottles of George T. Stagg Bourbon and other choice whiskeys, and 50 entrants had won three apiece?

Yes, how could that be? Could it have something to do with the fact that VABC is the very same agency that just last year found itself caught up in an insider-trading scandal in which a (now-former) employee was peddling information about upcoming releases via his dipshit friend’s Facebook account, dismaying bourbon taters and delighting Fingers readers apace? Not according to VABC’s spokesperson: the authority told WaPo it has “found no evidence of inappropriate administration of the lottery drawing, or intentional manipulation by staff or customers,” and blames the situation on “an issue in the sorting of the lottery entry data in our software.” Which, huh, look into that, wouldja?

Though this story is short on “just some guys doing some crimes” intrigue (for now, at least), this bit intrigued the hell out of me: