Infinite recursion during bootstrap if lock_acquire() fails due to invalid Memcache URL

For example, if I break my Memcache URLs like so:

$conf['memcache_servers'] = array(
  'some-broken-server-url-1.net:11211' => 'default',
  'some-broken-server-url-2.net:11211' => 'default',
);

Then what happens is during Drupal's bootstrap, variable_initialize() inside bootstrap.inc gets called, which runs this:

if (!lock_acquire($name, 1)) {
  // Another request is building the variable cache.
  // Wait, then re-run this function.
  lock_wait($name);
  return variable_initialize($conf);
}

So basically, if it can't acquire a lock, then it re-runs recursively. However, the lock_acquire() inside memcache-lock-code.inc doesn't seem to be able to intelligently handle the case where it's pointing at an invalid Memcache server. It looks like this:

function lock_acquire($name, $timeout = 30) {
  global $locks;

  // Ensure that the timeout is at least 1 sec. This is a limitation
  // imposed by memcached.
  $timeout = (int) max($timeout, 1);

  if (dmemcache_add($name, _lock_id(), $timeout, 'semaphore')) {
    $locks[$name] = _lock_id();
  }
  elseif (($result = dmemcache_get($name, 'semaphore')) && isset($locks[$name]) && $locks[$name] == $result) {
    // Only renew the lock if we already set it and it has not expired.
    dmemcache_set($name, _lock_id(), $timeout, 'semaphore');
  }
  else {
    // Failed to acquire the lock.  Unset the key from the $locks array even if
    // not set, PHP 5+ allows this without error or warning.
    unset($locks[$name]);
  }

  return isset($locks[$name]);
}

So the lock_acquire there just continues to return FALSE, which causes variable_initialize() to re-run itself forever.

Thoughts? I'm having trouble finding a way to intelligently handle this, outside of just having lock_acquire eventually throw an error if it gets called a certain number of times with the same $name and fails every time.