The World Cup and the GAA championship are occupying most of the sporting attention at the moment, but for those who like their sport a bit more dangerous and adrenaline-fuelled, there’s always the running of the bulls in Pamplona, which is in full swing at the moment.
A hardy soul in the JOE office is one of the thousands of slightly mad revellers at the annual festival in the Basque region of Spain and the bulls have been as raucous as ever, as is evident from a quite graphic photograph in today’s Daily Star.
Nobody has yet been fatally injured at this year’s festival, but according to an accompanying report in the paper, there have been three serious injuries, including one to a 43 year old Irishman who was admitted to hospital on Thursday with a serious gash from a bull’s horn.
Now, this next story is just taking the piss. Frankly, we’ve got a bit sick of Paul the Octopus, the psychic squid who has correctly predicted about five games in the World Cup. Even though we want Spain to win tomorrow’s World Cup final, we wouldn’t begrudge the Dutch a victory simply to stop this farce once and for all. But, it ain’t that easy. It seems we’re going to be hearing about the punditry powers of a flippin’ parakeet if Holland come out on top tomorrow night.
According to today’s Irish Sun, psychic parakeet Mani, a massive celebrity in his native Singapore, who has also correctly predicted five World Cup matches in a row, has gone for Holland ahead of tomorrow’s final.
According to his owner, M Muniyappan, the bird predicts results by selecting with his beak one of two cards which bear the flags of competing nations.
“He’s a special birdâ€, Muniyappan told the paper. “People usually want Mani’s help for picking the lottery numbers or deciding when to get married. But then gamblers started asking about the World Cup, so I put him to work on that too.
He has only done five matches for me, but he’s always right. He told me the winners of all the quarter-finals and also tipped Spain in their semi.â€
We never thought we’d hear ourselves say this, but we’ll nearly be glad the World Cup is over just to get a break from this sort of crap for a while.
