Final Word from Friday, April 1, 2011
Wherever there is carrion, there are vultures, and the decaying flesh of Sazka has attracted the very best predators the Czech Republic has to offer. Four of the Five Families (J&T, KKCG, Penta, PPF) are directly involved in scavenging on the Sazka remains, and the other (Bakala) is prodding about with a stick by giving front-page coverage in HN to previously unspeakable chatter about Václav Klaus lobbying on behalf of the capo di tutti capi, Petr Kellner. Sazka is of course only the means for the Families to get their claws into the real quarry - the weak, the poor, the downtrodden - all those who make up the vast majority of the people who spend billions on bets they statistically cannot win. The rapper Lil Wayne might call these bettors who senselessly throw away their money April babies - "cause they fools." But without a large supply of fools, there would be no Sazka, and no vultures.
Glossary of difficult words
carrion - the decaying flesh of dead animals;
predator - an animal that naturally preys on other animals;
Five Families - our expression for the five major Czech financial groups;
to scavenge - (of an animal) to search for (carrion) as food;
to prod - to poke someone or something with a finger, foot or pointed object;
unspeakable - not able to be expressed in words;
chatter - idle or trivial talk;
capo di tutti capi - the boss of all bosses;
quarry - prey, victim, target;
downtrodden - opposed or treated badly by people in power;
cause they fools - the present tense of the verb "to be" is often omitted in colloquial black speech.