Penalties between items?

["F. Miller Maley" <maley@idaccr.org>]

How does ConTeXt decide what penalties to place between items in a
\startitemize...\stopitemize construction?  Looking at the vertical list
with \showlists, I sometimes see a penalty of -5, sometimes 500, and
sometimes 10000.

There's a place in my document where TeX prefers to break a page just
before the last line of an \item paragraph, leaving 2 blank lines at
the bottom of the page, rather than breaking after the paragraph and
leaving one blank line.  There appears to be a penalty of 10000 here.
Are penalties added to prevent breaking just after the first item in
a list?

It should be easy to add my own breakpoints with inbetween={\blank\penalty0}
or something, but presumably this is not the natural solution.  I looked
briefly at the other options to \setupitemize without finding the answer.
Apologies if the answer is obvious....

-- Miller Maley