ESC

For every year I am gone from home, one thing gets harder and harder to miss: The Eurovision Song Contest. This contest is one of the major events of the year - all from the national contests finding the song to represent us (the right one obviously never wins. Except for -88 of course, "Stad i ljus" was my absolute favourite. Although it scored rather mediocre in the european contest), to the evening of the actual event. And the thrill of the counting of votes, always in English and French, out of tradition these days, I assume. I hope they never stop doing the French part. It would remove the very soul of the event if they did.

This year I started searching around to see if there is any way I can witness the ESC, or at least get to know some of the songs. And lo and behold, the official site actually lets you listen to excerpts of the songs. So I spent a while last night going through them all, and then by "other means" getting hold of a few of the full songs, that were particularly interesting.

Particularly interesting eurovision songs need not be the very best ones. For me, it's mainly the most typical ones, the ones sticking to tradition, the ones trying as much as they can NOT to stick to tradition, the ones totally climbing outside of the frame, etc. I think I liked Norway quite a lot (haven't heard the enitire one yet though), England is cute, and Finland, wohow! Hard Rock Hallelujah is the title, and I'm not sure the ESC has seen anything like it before. I like it, very very much. Sweden is very typical this year. However, I don't understand why the sound of a squeaking door in the beginning of every word has to be added, in the english version of the song, that is. It wasn't there in the swedish version! (a la Britney Spears, I thought it had grown out of fashion, but apparently I've been away too long from the euro-tradition - it's there in a lot of the songs). I have yet to discover the oh so wonderful keychanges in the songs though. Please let me know if you find any.

English versions: A few years ago, to my great dismay, they decided to change the rules of the language of the song. Previously, every country had to sing in their own language. Which, some claimed, gave unfair bias towards English speaking countries. I'm sceptical. It was only Ireland that always won, England and Malta were pretty much in the middle anyhows. I loved being able to hear all the different languages. Even Danish has its charm when being sung ;)

So now, instead, they are doing something that's even worse, in my opinion - they mix the languages. Argh. I am not sure why I find that so repulsive, but I do. It's not right. One thing that IS rather cool though, is the explosion of participating countries, making it necessary to score high in order to be able to enter next year. Reason to this is of course all the "new" eastern european countries. And we still have Israel and Turkey, which was always a bit funny to me. Well, I guess Turkey technically has a a tiny part that is part of Europe.

On another note, I have cats again. My advisor has very late habits, and so do her cats, I noticed. They kept waking me up all night. In the morning, when I by some miracle woke up pretty early despite having had to run up all night and figure out what the strange noises came from, they were sound asleep on my bed, one cat by my feet, and the other next to my pillow. They seem to like my apartment as much as I do, and the usually fairly shy and cautious Alex has turned into a cuddle ball.

EWW! It is snowing.