Eurovision
This week I had my first experience with The Eurovision Song Contest, which I have heard references to since arriving here in Scotland. It is a contest where all the countries of Europe enter a song into the contest and they perform and people vote on it. In theory, the best song wins.
In actual practice, it seems quite different. First of all, one of the competing countries is Israel. Since when is Israel part of Europe? Israel isn't even Europe-adjacent like Turkey. Second, each country isn't allowed to vote for themselves, so they all vote for their neighboring countries. Especially Eastern Europe. All the former communist states vote for each other, and they out-number the non-former-communist countries, so they always get more votes.
The song that won was crap. The song won because the whole band was dressed like extras from Lord of the Rings, but in actual reality, they were just a really cheesy pop version of a Kiss tribute band. But the fact that a sucky song won is no surprise, since most of the songs sucked. (Ireland wasn't too bad, but it wasn't the best music I've heard from Ireland by far.)
My husband was telling me that the winner of the song contest's country has to host it next year, and it is expensive and kind of a bad deal as a prize. So here's what I think it really is: no one wants to host the contest, so they all purposely enter the worst song they can find so that they don't have to host it. The winner is actually the country that most clearly succeeds in finding a song that sucks so bad that they know they won't have to fork out millions to host the thing the following year. So Finland, with their Kiss tribute band really only succeeded in having the suckiest national song that failed to suck more than the others. The real winner was Malta, with only one point.
Good for you, Malta.
Alana
