Today, I inform you of the passing of Paul, the Psychic Octopus. Paul is believed to have hatched in January 2008, and died last week, on October 26, 2010.
Paul was a common octopus residing in an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. For those of you who hadn't heard, Paul achieved international fame after correctly picking the winners of 8 games (out of 8 that he chose for, giving him a perfect record) in the 2010 World Cup. To get his predictions, the trainers placed a piece of food in each of two clear plastic boxes, each of which was marked with the flag of one of the teams in the match. Whichever box Paul opened first, and ate the contents of, was the predicted winner (as seen below, when he predicted Spain's win over Germany). The odds of successfully picking the winner 8 times straight is estimated at 256 to 1. At the conclusion of the World Cup, Paul went into retirement, although he did receive an ambassadorship from England for it's 2018 bid.
As a result of his success, Paul became the most famous octopus in... OK, I can't think of another famous octopus. Any ideas?
Images courtesy of Wikipedia
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4 comments:
Oswald the Octopus. But.. he isn't real. He's a childrens cartoon that I always found a little odd because he had a pet weiner dog and wore a hat all the time... but he's an octopus so it could count?
More than I could come up with, sure he counts.
Well there is the famous octopus gardener from that little pop group, the Beatles.
Welll.... if you count her, Ursula from The Little Mermaid XD
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