Octo-damus strikes again

Is there something especially cruel about having an eight-armed sea creature predict the outcome of a game in which the use of arms is banned?

Perhaps. This doesn’t explain, though, the level of animosity towards Paul, the (apparently) clairvoyant octopus vulgaris who chose correctly in the last six matches in which Germany played during the 2010 FIFA World Cup — before picking the Finals winner (Spain) with as much nonchalance as a buffet customer at Red Lobster. It was the semi-finals prediction that did in Paul, though, when he deposed the Deutschland, incurring the wrath of football fans from Rostock to Munich. The preternaturally gifted sea creature was greeted with as much vilification as Cleveland fans unloaded on freewheeling, free-dealing LeBron James.

Threats to turn Paul into every type of seafood — from sushi to calamari to paella — flooded Facebook and Twitter pages. Who knew football fans Twittered or Facebooked? Meanwhile, Spaniards have vowed to remove octopus from their seafood paella. Though the thought of enjoying fried octopus pulatan with round-robin pitchers of draft beer did make the prospect of watching the Finals match palatable, I think it’s a bit unfair to blame Paul for his oracular abilities. By all accounts, he’s a common octopus, hatched innocently from an egg in the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, England before being ensconced in a tank at Sea Life Oberhausen, a popular aquarium in Germany. This was only his second gig at prognostication, having successfully charted Germany’s fate in the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship. Perhaps he’s not used to the limelight. Certainly he’s not used to the death threats.

Then again, there seems to be something bordering on self-shadenfreude about a nation — Germany — willing to hang its collective national pride on the random feeding habits of a large mollusk. These things can always backfire, and when they do, it’s really not very sporting to blame the messenger. Or the soothsayer, whatever the species. It’s kind of like asking a Magic Eight Ball to tell you how you should feel about being American, or Filipino, or whatever. Look within for answers, not to the eight-armed Nostradamus.

Then again, that egg was hatched in England. And Germany and England have been adversaries on the playing fields, among other fields, for close to a century. Could some crafty Weymouth marine biologist have programmed that egg (maybe with sub-sonar pulses in the womb) to consign Germany to the World Cup dustbin, after raising every German’s hopes by picking favorably in earlier rounds?

Who knows? Science is weird these days.

The way Paul makes his picks is this: the octopus wranglers put two identical snacks (usually an oyster or a mussel) inside two clear plastic boxes decorated with national colors of opposing teams; whichever snack/colors Paul scoots to first will, allegedly, be the winning team in the upcoming match. This is the sort of thing that alarms PETA and racks up huge gambling odds. Paul, we are informed by Oberhausen wranglers, is well-provided-for. He gets snacks, after all. This is something the aquarium-raised cephalopod mollusk would have considerable difficulty gathering on, say, the streets of Hamburg. So relax, PETA.

The funny thing about Paul’s recent endangered status is that the Spanish Industry Minister, Miguel Sebastian, has offered the octopus safe haven in Spain, while Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero jokingly offered to send a state protection team to Paul’s tank (according to Wikipedia). All in good fun, but isn’t this how World War One started?

Some scientists offer their own explanation for Paul’s uncanny predictive powers. Octopi do respond to vivid colors and “bold horizontal shapes,” at least according to Shelagh Malham of Bangor University. She says Paul might have been drawn to the Serbian flag’s bright colors in the earlier round or Spain’s broad lower stripe in the semi-final round. The German flag is, well, a bit drab in comparison. (Sorry, Charlie.)

The proof, though, lies in the pudding. As Paul, upon further prodding, went on to pick Spain for the final match against The Netherlands, I was curious to see if he really had “The Shine” or if he was simply a lucky picker. I stayed up, along with countless others in Manila (plus a billion or so people worldwide), to catch the final match.

Actually it was just the second half of what turned out to be a yawn-inducing nil-nil Finals between Spain and the Netherlands. The announcer kept making his own Nostradamic pronouncements, such as “Someone’s going to have to do something either remarkable or very silly” for a goal to happen. Yawn. The game went into extra time and, as the world now knows, Spain’s Andres Iniesta popped in a netter in the last seven minutes of extended play, and Paul moved from being merely entertaining to eerily psychic.

So no more octopus paella in Spain. And as for Germany? They might want to consider promoting Paul to Finance Minister or somesuch.

The question, though, is this: What doesn’t Paul know? The odds of picking successfully went well beyond 50 percent by the time the cephalopod made his sixth pick. Now he really looks like some kind of eight-armed prophet. Can the world now employ him as its own Magic Eight (-Armed) Ball, helping to decide on matters of great importance, such as: Is global warming really going to roast us in 30 years, or do we get to stick around and drown in 70 years? Will Noynoy ever get to a presidential appointment in time? Will somebody please take George Michael’s driver’s license away now? And will the vuvuzela be used as a torture device against terror suspects in the near future?

In the wake of Paul’s predictions, people naturally started hoisting up their own animals, hoping to get some YouTube attention, and we got a wave of mynah birds and chimps supposedly gifted with precognition. These were pretenders, it turns out: none of them has the track record of the clairvoyant mollusk of Oberhausen.

Octo-damus über alles!