OH MY GOD, Y'ALL. Are you ready for the ELECTION? I mean, did you realize the election was about to happen (could be this very day depending on when you are reading this)? I have never been so ready for something to just HAPPEN already. The anticipation, the nausea, the euphoric hope followed by the dreadful paranoia? This has got to be what pregnancy feels like. I mention it because this episode was so littered with nutjob commercials, I can hardly bear to bloop past them on my Tivo -- especially the local ones. Lord, the desperate insanity of Southern politics. Deliver us all.

Back at the Horrible School for Unloved Children, Sad Young Ned spent his long weekends with the other boys who had nowhere else to go. In the thrall of a weirdly Rubenesque boy, Ingmar Todd, son of "roving missionaries," the four lonesome rejects jump in a gambling ring, betting their most prized possessions in his roulette game. (Nerd alert: Though he appears to be German or Scandanavian, Ingmar's parents must have roved only through the U.S., the Caribbean and South America as he is running an American roulette wheel.) Ned has nothing to wager but the meager remains of a box of chocolates he hastily stuck in his suitcase before being carted away from home by his dad. He bets almost all of his remaining chocolates before suddenly noticing a note, previously unseen, from his mother. She had planned to give him these very chocolates before she died. JD tells us that, like many amateur roulette players, Young Ned had hedged by betting on both red and black, but failed to consider the nefarious green "double zed," upon which this game now unfortunately hinges. The crushing realization about his mother's chocolates arrives at the moment the ball drops. House wins, Young Ned loses. The lesson, Jim Dale tells us, was clear. "In gambling, no matter how well you think you know the odds, there's always an outcome you can't see coming." And oh, how bitterly true it is. (The previous paragraph is brought to you by closed captioning, since I can't understand half of the beautiful words of Jimmy D, due to the superloudness of the accompanying soundtrack.)

Anyhoodle, Ned's lesson hit home. He took few gambles in his life following that game, save opening a restaurant that serves only pies, and having a relationship with a girl he brought back from death and could kill again with a single brush of his hand. Huh. When I type it out like that, those sound like big gambles.

Betting on Chuck, though, has made Ned happier than he had ever been in his life -- especially when she feeds him a little bit of her latest creation, spring passion fruit pie. "Now, I know it's not spring here," she says as Ned's eyes crinkle with love, "but it is in New Zealand, which is exotic and upside down... which is how we could serve it." Natch, he is fully charmed by this, and says they can put it on the menu. "I like daring men!" Chuck says, excited. Ned: "It seems, since you arrived, Cautious Ned has left the building." Well, not really, but who is to argue with those eyebrows?