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This year's Eurovision kind of sucks, and the Polish entry is just a full-on travesty, but there's always something exotic enough to make the contest amusing for me. My current favourite is this Moldovan-Turkish guy with a midget playing the flute: So, anyone else following this very important cultural event?

I think Serbia was genuinely quite good! At least it stood out. Croatia was funny and I like the relentless political parody, but I wish it was a bit more catchy/less messy. Welp, we'll see whether something in the second semi-finals tops what we've seen so far.

I've been quite happy with the line-up so far in terms of entertainment factor. Countries like Holland, Malta, Switzerland or Ireland especially suck almost every year, so I expected nothing else. But there has also been stuff like Serbia with its weird Gundam video show: Or Croatia with whatever this is: My personal favourite was Finland with its weird mixture of EBM and Eurodance, but performed with the right dose of self-irony. Also worth mentioning is Israel, who managed to send a pop song so generic yet overflowing with terribly misguided attempts at being quirky that it transcends our pedestrian notions of what constitutes good or bad.

Yeah, definitely skillful. I guess whisper-singing is not my thing, if used as a default mode And yeah, she definitely has quite "non-japanese" sound. My problem is that I actually like that "sameness" of japanese pop - their "vintage"/old fashioned melodies and chord progressions, that make it stand out from the modern mainstream euro or US scene.

I'm pretty sure there's a free livestream on the Eurovision website every year, I watched it that way a few years back when I was abroad for the contest. And yeah, Sweden is 100% winning this year, nothing comes even close. Not that I'm such a huge fan of the song or Loreen, but simply the competition is a few levels behind her in most aspects, and her live performance skills are impeccable.