A horse and a hat

The following account of events is no fiction either. It's a true story as told to me by a close friend and relative. It goes like this: My friend had dealings with senior Greek government officials during the previous administration of Kostas Karamanlis, Greece's ex Premier. I saw my friend in June 2009, a day after he had a meeting with a key Minister whose name consists of the modern Greek word for horse and the regional slung for hat. He told me then what the Minister had told him the day before, which is exactly what happened four months later (early elections of October which the incumbent government would lose) and greatest austerity measures in living memory (which the newly elected government would have to announce). The Minister also told my friend that due to the severity of the measures the new government would have to call for elections before it completes 12 months in power because of the Greek public's reaction to the austerity measures. So far my friend has proven to be 100 per cent right. It is irrelevant if Greece will see new elections again this year to totally vindicate the ex Minister's prediction expressed in his confinement to my friend. The morale of this story is the precision and retrospective hindsight the Minister's predicitons had, reminiscing the god-like powers of an oracle. In ancient Greece he would have been revered for his Pythian premonition powers. In modern Greece we simply know he is just a crook for if he really had the powers to tell fortunes, he should also have had the ability to take appropriate measures to prevent the disaster that has befallen upon us. Hats off man. You really kick like a horse, deadly and without warning.