A Victory for Global Happiness, 4:0 for Paul or Trusting the Oracle Octopus

I studied Ancient Greek for four years and while my Graecum usually helps me to decipher all sorts of odd sounding words, it left me quite clueless when I stumbled across “cephalopod”. Almost every website has recently been banned at work, but fortunately Wikipedia still works and so I learned that a cephalopod is literally a “head-feet” and more commonly referred to as an inkfish or octopus.

You may now wonder where this sudden interest in marine biology has come from after this blog and my life have been completely dominated by football in the past weeks. And of course the reason is football related: Germany’s newest, yet already most popular and definitely best-looking football expert is Paul, the Oracle Octopus from the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen.

Psychic Paul predicts the outcome of Germany’s World Cup matches by plucking a mussel from one of two glass boxes; one mussel comes from Germany the other one from the opposition country. So far, the Oracle Octopus has a 100% track record and predicted the outcome of all Germany matches, including the painful defeat to Serbia, accurately!

On Tuesday, Paul predicted that Germany would defeat Argentina in a tight Quarterfinal on Saturday! Initially, Paul went straight for the German box, but then hesitated for an hour (maybe indicating extra time?) before plucking the German mussel! Now that’s what I call a reliable source!

A repeat of Germany’s 2006 victory over Argentina would certainly make 85 million Germans very happy, but the French, Italians and South Koreans will also be chuffed if their favourite nation proceeds to the next stage of the tournament.

If you just shook your head in disbelief about the last sentence, thinking that you must have misread something, let me assure you that you did not! According to an annual survey conducted by GlobeScan, Germany is the most popular nation among twenty-eight countries featured in the survey and has the most positive influence in the world - and no, the other countries were not only Iran, Pakistan and North Korea! Germany topped the poll for the second year in a row followed by Japan, Britain and France. Since the runner-up countries in the global popularity contest have already been – more or less glamorously - kicked out of the World Cup, it is clearly up to Germany to secure global happiness.

The survey also included Argentina, but for some strange reason it was impossible to find out how they scored… So let us hope that Argentina’s presumably average score in the global popularity contest will be reflected by an average performance in the World Cup and that Psychic Paul, the Oracle Octopus will be right again and Germany beat Argentina on Saturday!