Paul the ‘Psychic’ Octopus Predicts Spain to Win World Cup

Paul the “Psychic” Octopus at the Oberhausen Sea Life Aquarium has picked Germany to beat Uruguay in the match Saturday for third place in the World Cup. He went straight for the mussel snack in the box marked with the German flag, his own intuitive (and hungry) method of revealing his pick to win. German news channels broadcast the event live, with eyes glued to the tube as Paul hesitated slightly before making his choice.

At the moment, Paul has correctly predicted the winner of all six of Germany’s World Cup matches: four victories and two losses, including the quarter-final loss against Spain.

As a result of that last call, Paul is not very popular in Germany these days. Newsweekly Der Spiegel reports that the Twittersphere is buzzing with death threats against the octopus in the form of calamari recipes.

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Argentina crushes Mexico to cruise into quarterfinals

Carlos Tevez scored twice as Argentina beat Mexico 3-1 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to set up a meeting with Germany in the quarterfinals of the World Cup.

The Manchester City striker opened the scoring after 25 minutes in controversial fashion when television replays, which were relayed on the giant screens in the stadium, showed he was offside when he received the ball from Lionel Messi and headed into the net.

Despite protests from the Mexican players, the goal was allowed to stand. Argentina doubled its lead when Gonzalo Higuain rounded goalkeeper Oscar Perez to score his fourth goal of the tournament.

Tevez made certain of the victory with a stunning long-range strike into the top corner early in the second half.

Javier Hernandez pulled a goal back for Mexico with a powerful left-footed drive after 70 minutes, but it proved to be little more than a consolation for the Mexicans as Argentina easily claimed the victory.

Manager Diego Maradona’s men almost scored a fourth goal when Perez had to dive to his right in stoppage-time to tip Messi’s shot over the bar.

Mexico, who has now gone out in the last 16 at five World Cups in a row, may feel the result could have been different without the error from the officials.

After seeing the error on the big screens, Mexican players surrounded the referee and his assistant but the officials decided not to revoke the goal.

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World Cup victories more popular than Obama’s victory

It’s not as audible as the noise from vuvuzelas, but internet buzz over the 2010 FIFA World Cup has observers calling the tournament the biggest event in Web history.

The tournament has surpassed the historic election of President Obama, which held that honor until now.

According to Akamai, a content delivery network, the Web peaked at more than 12 million users per minute just two hours after the kickoff between South Africa and Mexico.

By comparison, about 8.5 million people were logging on per minute the November evening that Obama was elected in 2008.

Noisemakers were also sounding out on Twitter, which has been seeing big spikes in the number of tweets every time a big goal is scored.

The site, which sees a daily average of 750 tweets per second, recorded a skyrocketing 2,940 after Japan scored against Cameroon last Monday.

Nearly as much traffic was reported after Brazil’s first goal against North Korea in its 2-1 victory that same day, as well as after Mexico’s tying goal against South Africa on June 11.

Still, it was an American favorite that scored Twitter’s single-biggest moment. The Los Angeles Lakers’ victory against the Boston Celtics at the NBA Championship last Thursday generated a record 3,085 tweets per second as the game ended.

Nonetheless, World Cup numbers have been so consistently high that Twitter was struggling to keep its ship afloat. The social networking site reported several outages attributed to high traffic specific to the World Cup.

The site said on its blog that it is “making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup,” and will allow users to monitor the status of the site.

And it’s not just the average (or angry) soccer fan who’s tweeting. When the United States was denied a miracle comeback against Slovenia last week after a referee’s controversial, late-game call, FIFA President Sepp Blatter turned to Twitter for a “response” to the resulting hullabaloo.

He wrote: “Thanks for all the questions on refereeing. My views on improving refs and video technology are here.” The link directs readers to a statement he made in March, explaining why there would be no instant replay at the World Cup, or anywhere else in world soccer, reported TIME.com.

Twitter said Monday it could not immediately provide statistics on the number of tweets it received during that match.

Blatter has been tweeting regularly since the start of the matches, with his vuvuzela tweet attracting nine followers per second, according to FIFA.

The federation’s website, FIFA.com, also has seen record-breaking numbers. Close to 300 million pages were accessed by nearly 10 million visitors when Brazil beat North Korea.

It’s a similar picture on TV. According to a report in Mediaweek, the first 14 matches of the World Cup, as seen on ESPN and ABC, have delivered an average of about 3.3 million viewers, which is a 64 percent increase from the same period in 2006, CNN.com reported Monday.

The U.S.-England match, which ended in a tie June 12, drew 13 million viewers to ABC, making it the most-watched first round World Cup game in U.S. broadcast history.

source: http://www.cnn.com