BBC News: 'Psychic' octopus predicts Germany victory over England

'Psychic' Paul went straight to the German container

An octopus in a German aquarium who is said to be psychic has predicted the country's football team will knock England out of the World Cup.

When consulted, Paul the octopus chose a mussel from a jar with the German flag on it ahead of one in a similar jar bearing the cross of St George.

The two-year-old cephalopod has a record of predicting past German results in this manner, his owners say.

Paul has so far correctly predicted all of Germany's results in South Africa.

His keepers say he correctly predicted 80% of Germany's results during the 2008 European Championship.

n that contest, Germany finished as runners-up in their qualifying group, having lost only once to Croatia.

They then progressed to the final, where they were beaten by Spain.

If keepers at the Oberhausen Sea Life Aquarium are right, he correctly predicted the outcome of four of the six games in that competition.

National celebrity

"Paul's prediction was phenomenal," said aquarium spokesman Tanja Munzig.

"He swam straight over to the German glass, climbed in and even put a lid on top once he was sitting inside."

The octopus, who was born in the UK and was moved to the German aquarium, has become a national celebrity after correctly predicting Germany would beat Australia in their opening match, then lose to Serbia, and then beat Ghana.

His latest prediction was flashed all over the German media.

The container that Paul opens first is said to be his pick for who will win the impending match, keepers say.

Germany finished the initial stage of the World Cup top of Group D, and face England, the runners-up from group C, in Bloemfontein on Sunday.

Gary Shteyngart

"The elephant knows there is nothing after this life and very little in it. The elephant is aware of his looming extinction, and he is hurt by it, reduced by it, made to feel his solitary nature, he who will eventually trample his way through brush and scrub to lie down and die where his mother once trembled her haunches to give him life. Mother, aloneness, entrapment, extinction."

Gary Shteyngart is one of the writers The New Yorker selected in their list of "20 under 40" for this week's fiction issue, and his story Lenny Hearts Eunice, which concerns a neurotic Jewish man in the near future, is notable.

from

oi Starbuck!

My friend Matt just showed me this vid from a band he knows down in Austin.

tricks

http://deadspin.com/5535220/fake-yo%20yo-trickster-fools-every-tv-station-everywhere

goodness!

Grant Morrison's "The Filth"

Just read and wanted to shout out to The Filth, a comic that covers about every topic we've discussed in this blog in ~318 bizarre and visually stunning pages. Its author, Grant Morrison, is perhaps best known for the frightening, allusive Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, a Batman comic so legit its artist, Dave McKean, felt he would have been selling out by drawing the Dark Knight as anything but a weird, bat-like wisp suffering a mental breakdown. "The repressed, armored, uncertain and sexually frozen [Bat]man in Arkham Asylum was intended as a critique of the '80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven, and borderline psychopathic," says Morrison in a note on Arkham.
The meta-parody is more obvious in The Filth. When a superhero called "Ultra-Huminatarian" is "smashed against the fiction wall," one character says, "we'll just fix it in the continuity," inventing a typically lame parallel-universe situation for the dead character.
"Not supermen but super-slaves in a synthetic prison," another character says later, regarding the same situation. "Playing out crummy meaningless adventures written by amoral monsters."
Of course to praise a work only for its meta aspects is to confuse literature with criticism, but I think all this stuff did need to be said in a comic book, and it's a great sci-fi adventure besides, one which demonstrates a lot of good ways for comic writers to solve the rut of being unable to make a story visually stimulating without having it feature tons of super-battles. Most of the violence is as disturbing and sad as it is funny, and the book also contains lots of weird sex, crazy machines, talking animals, monstrous spermatazoa... I mean you should probably just read it, I can lend it to you.