Will Paul land in the pot?

For those of you who aren't big football fans, especially big German national team fans, the name Paul, and the fact that he is an octopus, won't tell you a lot.

Octopuses are highly intelligent creatures, and in order to prevent them going bananas in captivity, their keepers have to keep on inventing new things to occupy them.

One of these things is to make it difficult to get food. A classic example of this is to put the food into a glass box, with a lid, in the tank, and leave the octopus to figure out how to get the food out again.

Well the zoo in Oberhausen, in the German Rührpott, decided to let the natural curiosity of the octopus, Paul, act as a tool in a football oracle - for each game that was to be played, the zoo-keepers put food in both of two glass boxes, which differed only in that each had the flag of one of the teams preparing to play in the game. The reasoning was - if Paul picks the right one more than once in a row, then he has an inspiration as to which team will win.

Amazingly Paul got every single choice correct. Imagine the disappointment then, when Paul picked Spain instead of Germany, leading up to the semifinal game yesterday? A world collapsed, and a spate of octopus-recipes flooded the german-speaking internet, for as we could all see, Germany did indeed lose, deservedly.

Now that tempers have cooled off somewhat, it appears that the 'mob' won't insist on slaughtering and eating Paul, so at least we can breathe a sigh of relief on that one, eh?