ManicDDaily

Paul Confronts the Competition

I was one of the few people lucky (or unlucky) enough not to need to actually watch the World Cup Final soccer in order to know that Spain would win.

This was not because of my confidence in the wonderful Spanish team’s ability to maintain elegant possession of the ball despite the relative shortness of their players (my not-tall husband’s pre-game desire), or because of any particular hope that the day would be saved by the extremely good looks of several members of the Spanish team (my daughter’s post-game view, most notably with regard to Jesus Naves and team captain and goalkeeper,Iker Casillas), or some wish, of my own, to see that the players that weren’t kicked in the chest would triumph.

No, my certainty of Spain’s victory resulted completely from my confidence in octopi, particularly the soothsaying Octopus Paul, a/k/a the “Oracle of Oberhausen” (named for the town in Germany in which his aquarium is located.)   A day or so before the game, Paul once again (for the eighth recorded time) exercised his psychic mussel errr…muscle to successfully pick Spain as the winner of the final match.   (What makes Paul’s foresight especially unusual among predictors of the future is that he picked the winners BEFORE the games occurred, and didn’t simply tell us about how right he was after the fact.)

The Dutch, on first hearing of Paul’s prediction, were justifiably downcast until some enterprising Dutch reporter found a competing soothsayer—a parakeet in Singapore.

But I, for one, knew that wouldn’t fly.

Parakeets simply don’t have the grasp of octopi, the breadth, the reach, the slithery coordination—

And let’s just suppose this isn’t all a statistical anomaly, a lucky guess—(could Paul have some tentacular hooks in ensuring the outcomes he predicts?  Could there be something fishy, as it were, going on in FIFAland?)

All I can say is eight for eight!

(And thank goodness the game wasn’t decided on penalty kicks!  A deciding factor that can seem almost as arbitrary as, well, the choice of a cephalopod.)

This entry was posted on July 12, 2010 at 11:23 pm and is filed under news. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: drawing of Paul the Octopus with Parakeet, Jesus Naves, manicddaily, Manicddaily pencil drawing, Octopus predicts World Cup Victory, Parakeet in Singapore compared to German Octopus, r Spain's victory over Netherlands, Spanish Goalkeeper Iker Casillas, World Cup Socce