VOTE FOR THY NEIGHBOURS AND THY BRETHREN IN FAITH (not to mention thy guest workers' homelands)

The text below is borrowed verbatim from a sister - well, "cousin" - blog. The post was written more than a year ago - and yet everything said in it still applies... (duh!)

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I've always wondered how many people actually watch (I hesitate to use the word "listen to") the dinosaur called the Eurosong.

It is my suspicion that most people only watch the final voting (which has long since become a self-parody, noticeable to everyone except the voters and the votees, it seems).

But even that has become tedious and boring beyond ridiculousness. After all, anyone who has ever watched it more than two or three times, knows by heart how each country will vote: Andorra will always vote for Spain and for France. Greece will vote for its neighbouring countries (except Macedonia, which it doesn't recognise as a country), with the highest number of votes going to Cyprus (the Greek part, of course), and viceversa. Russia will vote for all its surrounding neighbours and for countries which claim adherence to the Orthodox faith. Turkey will vote for Armenia (oh yeah, that'll take the sting out of the genocide of 1916!), Germany will vote for Turkey, no matter what: it's the country whence most of its foreign »guest workers« come from.

And so on.

The endurance of the cretinous anomaly called the Eurosong is one of the great mysteries of our time. I am pretty sure you have no idea who won last year, even if you did listen to the... ehm, music. With very few exceptions, none of the winners – not to mention the non-winners (who were more often than not actually better than the winners) – faded back into international obscurity whence they had emerged for that single night.

It's the debutante ball for »new democracies« - a sort of Vienna Ball, minus the music. In other words, it's tacky, wasteful, has no discernible social or even political purpose (even though voting is done almost exclusively on the basis of current politics).

Bring in the clowns already...
They are way more entertaining and they certainly have more political relevance, free thought - and more durable musical influence.

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N.B.

And the clowns ARE in... :)