Octopus? Really? Interesting...

Guys,

So, I brain-wedged a merge here just now
and was surprised to see that a simple
fetch-n-merge yielded an octopus merge.
I was expecting a fast-forward.  So I went
back and reviewed.  What actually happend
was this:

    $ git checkout master
    $ git fetch origin
    # check it out... looks great ... let's merge it
    $ git merge master origin/master
    merge performed by octopus.

Oh, yeah.  Duh.  I did name two branches.  Feh.

Couple questions:

    Is it ever NOT the case, that if you are on one
    branch ("master") and name it as a "to be merged"
    branch along with some others, that we can simplify
    the request by noting that it is the same as the
    current "to be merged into" target branch?

    Other than creating a log message with "merged
    by octopus", will this merge be content-identical
    to the obvious simplified merge?

Thanks,
jdl