Es Perfecto… Y Ya Es Muerto
Paul is dead.
Has been for a while (going on three months now), but his ashes will live on as part of a memorial.
Strange to think that the two longest shelf lives from the World Cup belong to a large breasted Paraguayan and an eight-legged aquanaut from England (born in Weymouth… but predictably, to find international success in football it had to go to Germany).
Paul, as you were bludgeoned with, was the octopus who correctly “predicted” the outcomes of eight matches in the 2010 World Cup. Then as is the fate of all, he died. But now his ashes will live on.
From Sea Life Centre spokeswoman Tanja Munzig: “There will be a statue around 1.80 metres high of Paul, on top of a football, in the middle of which will be a see-through window with the golden urn containing Paul’s ashes.”
We’d like to point you to the following blurb from the Guatemalan paper Prensa Libre (warning PDF link, oh and warning PDF is also in Spanish) where, using a coin-tossing model, Jose Merida points out that one in every 178 individuals would correctly predict the same outcomes as Paul. And seeing how there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the globe picking the outcomes, there were certainly thousands of people who were as successful as Paul.
They just happen to not be an octopus, so none of them is famous.
The Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany does already have a replacement octopus on display. The cleverly named Paul II now swims about. The aquarium hasn’t determined if they are going to have him try to “predict” the winners in the next Euro.
Jozy Altidore starting in the Copa Del Rey right now on ESPN3.
Are we sure that Nige de Jong still didn’t have anything to do with Paul’s death?
if the odds of predicting 8 games with a 50/50 chance be 1 in 256, how’d the author get to 1 out of 176?
Crap… Citeh score late to seal it. Stoke to extra time.
Clematona: That’s 8 in a row at 50-50. Paul predicted 12 out of 14 overall if you include the previous Euro (where he went 4 for 6). So the Guatemalan claim is based on that. My guess is that he used combinations that weren’t sequence dependent. So it didn’t matter if you lost the first two or the last two, you were still 12 of 14. I am too lazy to check the math.
Although I think the “Paul” who did the Euro wasn’t really the same Paul. Even though they were both called “Paul.”
why can’t i see you, new comments