Should Azerbaijan have won the Eurovision Song Contest?
For years, the Eurovision Song Contest has been decided through a popular vote.
However, this year they decided to give half of the voting power to professional juries in each country.
But what was the consequence of this?
They have now revealed what the result would have been if all power had been with the juries, but for some reason they haven’t done the same for the popular vote.
Could this be because the winner of the popular vote was Azerbaijan?
I’ve put the popular and jury votes into a table and subtracted one from the other:
| Azerbaijan | 112 | 207 | 95 |
| Norway | 312 | 387 | 75 |
| Turkey | 114 | 177 | 63 |
| Greece | 93 | 120 | 27 |
| Russia | 67 | 91 | 24 |
| Albania | 26 | 48 | 22 |
| Armenia | 71 | 92 | 21 |
| B&H | 90 | 106 | 16 |
| Spain | 9 | 23 | 14 |
| Finland | 12 | 22 | 10 |
| Romania | 31 | 40 | 9 |
| Ukraine | 68 | 76 | 8 |
| Sweden | 27 | 33 | 6 |
| Estonia | 124 | 129 | 5 |
| Portugal | 64 | 57 | -7 |
| Lithuania | 31 | 23 | -8 |
| Croatia | 58 | 45 | -13 |
| Moldova | 93 | 69 | -24 |
| Germany | 73 | 35 | -38 |
| Iceland | 260 | 218 | -42 |
| Denmark | 120 | 74 | -46 |
| UK | 223 | 173 | -50 |
| Israel | 107 | 53 | -54 |
| Malta | 87 | 31 | -56 |
| France | 164 | 107 | -57 |
Of course, the right-hand column does not show exactly what people voted, only how much they diverged from the juries, so perhaps Norway would still have won.
But I think it’s beyond doubt that Azerbaijan would have been very close to winning, and that the UK and especially France would have been huge disasters had they not introduced juries.
Star Trek
It was The Next Generation (with Jean-Luc Picard et al.) that got me hooked on Star Trek.
After watching all the episodes, I watched the movies, and I then moved on to The Original Series.
I’ve now spent the past year or so working my way through Enterprise, the latest series which takes place before TOS.
However, I finally watched the last episode last week, so I had to embark on a new project.
I decided on Deep Space Nine, which will probably take me a year or two to get through, after which I still have to watch Voyager.
But what shall I do thereafter? Is there any hope of a new Star Trek series?
Anyway, I’m watching the first episode of DS9 as I write this, and on Saturday I’m going to see the new film with Phyllis, Marcel and Charlotte in the cinema.
Learning from Gordon Brown
I was so inspired by a video clip with Gordon Brown that I wanted to try to mimic his outstanding gestures and body language.
Here is my attempt:
For comparison, here is the master himself. I’m really impressed how he manages to smile in random places without any connexion to what he’s saying:
Better than the real ones?
A couple of years ago, Phyllis asked me to buy “One Chisel Each” in the staff bookshop.
Or so I though – it turned out I had misheard what she said, and what she wanted was “On Chesil Beach
To be honest, I’ve ever since thought “One Chisel Each” was a better title, and I often wondered what that book would have been about – two stonemasons falling in love, perhaps?
Then, a few months ago, I was looking through the piles of novels in the staff bookshop when a book cover caught my imagination: “The Queen of Subtitles”.
I was about to take it down from the shelf when I realised it was really called “The Queen of Subtleties
Has anybody else got any other book titles they misunderstood and preferred to the real one?
Wrong ages
I was going to blog this just after I saw Mamma Mia! in the cinema, but then I forgot, but now Phyllis got it on DVD for Christmas, so we watched it again recently.
Plot spoilers follow.
In the movie, Donna (played by Meryl Streep, born 1949) is playing the mother of Sophie (played by Amanda Seyfried, born 1985).
While 36 is a fine age for having a daughter, she’s very clearly described as having been young and foolish at the time, which to me says no more than 25, but probably just 20. So the age gap is about 15 years too big.
Also, Donna’s lovers at the time of Sophie’s conception are shown dressed as hippies, which would date this at between 1968 and 1975.
But the film takes place in the present, so Sophie must have been conceived about 10 to 15 years before she was born.
Now, if the movie had been set in the mid-90s (at about the time when the musical was conceived), it could all have been made to fit nicely: A mother in her early forties conceived her daughter, now in her early twenties, in the early 70s.
However, for some weird reason (probably that the people behind Mamma Mia! were thinking of Donna as their contemporary), they decided to keep the background story and Sophie’s age, but to make Donna old enough to have been a hippie in her youth.
It’s all a bit strange, and it means the movie is almost clinically cleansed of people between 25 and 50.
If I had been in charge, I would definitely have set the movie in the mid-90s, with a much younger actress as Donna.
I’d just play it
I discover the online comic strip XKCD today by reading Søren Mors’ status on Facebook.
Very nerdy, and quite funny at times.
This particular cartoon puzzles me, however.
Would anybody not feel comfortable playing the word clitoris in a family context if it’s purely for the game’s sake?
Am I just not repressed enough?
Music store for Linux
Amazon's MP3 downloader for Linux.
Their page recommended downloading a helper application.
I already braced myself for the ubiquitous “Windows only”, but not this time! Amazon actually supply their helper also for Linux (even in four variants: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE).
So after installing the helper application, it all worked absolutely beautifully, and Phyllis is now singing along happily.
Famous for the wrong books
I forgot to blog last week that Michael Crichton has died.
Most people probably know him for Jurassic Park
However, his first work that made an impression on me was The First Great Train Robbery
His ideas got progressively worse, I’m sorry to say.
Timeline
In spite of this, his books were always a good read.
Is torture better for kids than naked breasts?
I don’t get the UK ratings system.
A movie like Coming to America, which is entirely harmless but contains a few naked boobs and sexual references, is rated 15.
On the other hand, Casino Royale, which contains graphical scenes of a naked man getting his testicles whipped, is rated 12A (which means that no kid is too young if accompanied by an adult).
I think I prefer Spanish ratings for violence (Casino Royale: 18) and Swedish ones for nudity (Coming to America: 7).
Curry cheating
Many Indian cookbooks are mostly about Indian home cooking. The food is nice, but it’s not what you encounter in Indian restaurants here.
However, some years ago I bought a most astonishing cookbook: The Curry Secret.
It’s a small paperback without any photos, but is teaches you how to do Indian restaurant cooking at home.
The trick is to make a basic curry sauce (which you can make in huge amounts and freeze in practical amounts) and to precook the meat (which again can be frozen).
When you then want to cook a nice curry, you just fry some of the basic sauce with some precooked meat and/or vegetables, and you add the relevant spices.
For instance, today I cooked both a dopiaza and a korma in less than half an hour. This was possible because I had made the basic sauce and the meat over the weekend.
Both the curries were lovely and very different – you couldn’t tell they were derived than the same sauce!