Eurovision - flying the flag

A poor quality video to reflect the poor quality of Eurovision. Which is what makes it so great. Although all the bloody Eastern bloc countries voted for each other and somehow a truly crap song, sung by a sort of female Ronnie Corbett managed to win. Our boys and girls finished a magnificent second from bottom but at least the vast array of Euro-food and booze was worth it all.

What the hell is 'halva' anyway?

Welcome back - me!

Hello again my lovely readers. I'm now back, as promised, after a short blog-break. We're off to a fabulous Eurovision party tonight. Now if you live outside Europe, you may have no idea what 'Eurovision' is. Well, briefly, it's a pan-European song contest which has been televised since it started way back in 1956.

The joy of Eurovision is the wonderful array of truly abysmal performers who have trod the Euro-glory path over the decades. True, the competition has actually spawned some very decent musical talent such as Dana (not the tranny from Israel - the Irish lass); Bucks Fizz and of course, Abba who won the contest in 1974.

Eurovision is a sort of national treasure. People love it because of its often terrible production values, appalling music and never-ending points-awarding section which used to last for hours. Sadly though, things have become a bit more professional in recent years and the scoring system has been rather curtailed which has detracted from the joy somewhat. However, there still promises to be a few gems of aural horror tonight. As it's a special Eurovision party we're going to, we had to pick a number which determined what country we get to support. We got Bosnia Herzegovina.

Yay.

Ketchup

Ooops. Forgot to post these last few days so here's a quick catchup/ketchup (geddit?) on what's been going on in my oh-so-hectic life:

Sunday - er, not much. Went for some grub at my in-laws
Monday - opened a new savings account, got a new exhaust fitted for my car and went to a baby-gothtastic gig; namely My Chemical Romance, which made me wish I'd worn more eyeliner
Tuesday - er, work

So, as you can see, it's non-stop action. However, it doesn't stop there. Tomorrow it's ten pin bowling, Friday, a bit of theatre, Saturday we're having a tree chopped down and Sunday, more eating out with relatives. This is all going to have to stop. I'm 41 for God's sake and I need to take it easy.

Someone fetch my pipe, slippers and copy of 'Herbacious Borders' monthly.

myTunes

I love iTunes. I currently have (as well as some video, numerous podcasts, a few games and audiobooks) 1,849 songs on my iMac. Apparently, that means I could play a different tune for 5 days, 10 hours, 13 minutes and 40 seconds. That many songs equates to 7.81 gigabytes which is pretty good, especially when my iPod can take another 22 gig's worth of songs before it's full.

Now there's one main reason I love iTunes. It's not the fact that I can now have instant access to my entire music library at any time. Neither is it the fact that I can add songs really quickly and easily whenever I want. No, the reason I really love iTunes is because it's opened my eyes to music I had either never heard, never enjoyed or forgotten about. I still have times when I'm listening to my iPod and song comes on that I've never heard before. Not only that, but because I'm listening to it on my super, noise-cancelling earphones the whole experience becomes more immersive and involving. I have discovered loads of songs that I'd never really listened to before and now find that they are among my favourites. Now that is pretty amazing.

Now I'm not going to be all pro-Apple here. Whichever music player and music system you use, the experience will be pretty much the same. Years ago, I had a Sony Walkman and listened to cassette tapes as I lay in the garden. Yet, almost no-one used these wonderful, but bulky, low audio-quality bits of kit on a daily basis. When the portable CD players came out, they became fairly popular but again, they were bulky. Also, you had to carry around dozens of spare CD's unless you really wanted to hear the same album over and over again. And boy, did they skip if you did anything like walking fast or, dare I say it, dance around a bit.

After the portable CD players had achieved moderate success, we saw the arrival of Minidisc players. I actually have an old Sony model. The sound quality was really good, so an improvement over the cassettes and on a par with the CD's. Where it scored over the CD players was that you could fit multiple albums onto one disc. I managed 5 albums on a disc, although the more music you added, the lower the quality as all the information had to be squeezed more tightly to fit onto the disc. Minidisc never really took off and I only ever bought one 'proper' minidisc album. Thanks Moby. After that, there was a long gap until MP3 players hit the streets and things really heated up when Apple launched the iPod in October 2001. I think we know what happened next.

When I got my iPod for my 40th birthday it was like being a child again. I was so excited and amazed at this revolution in music that appeared when I opened the box. And now I can't imagine not having a portable music player in my possession. I can't imagine not having 1849 songs on my computer. So what's going to happen when the next generation of music format arrives? Perhaps we'll have to grapple with virtual music, liquid sound or nano tunes. Who knows? What I do know is that ABBA were right when they said...

... "Thank you for the music".