EuroVision

Europe has a big musical competition called Eurovison. This is a big thing in Bosnia, the BiH singer came third this year. What that means is that of all the singers in the final round (24 singers) all the countries of Europe voted BiH the third best, after Finland and Russia. The Finnish band was a faux-Heavy metal band with goulish costumes and everything, the blasphemous title of thier song was 'Hard Rock Halleluja'. Everyone hated it, except for the voters who didn't like all the pop acts. Because Finland was the only thing close to rock, it got all those votes while the pop vote got split 23 ways. The Russian song and singer were absolute trash, the latter was trashy. Somehow everyone loved him, including kids here. Maybe everyone but me is crazy.

The BiH song was incredibly beautiful, I really like it. If you have speakers you can listen to it here. It get's played a lot around here, and I'm betting that the singer will become a national hero for a little while. The Croatian song is catchy and fun to dance too, but it was terribly performed, and the lyrics were incredibly awful.

The crazy thing about this contest is who countries give votes to (they can't vote for themselves). Citizens vote with their cell phones, and the votes almost always go to their neighbors. For instance, Serbia & Montenegro gave their top three votes to Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia. So much for ethnic hatred. Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia all voted for each other, with the Macedonian TV host going so far as to say 'this is for you brothers' in Bosnian as he announced bosnia got thier top vote. The whole telecast was in English, so the change in language really stood out. As you can imagine, eastern block countries voted for their former comrades, you can read it all here (the higher the points the better).

I wondered. If Canada could send a musician or band, who would we send? Maybe leave a comment with your choice.

My three favourite songs were from BiH, Latvia and Germany.