Eurovision Song Contest 2009
 

The Eurovision Song Contest 2009 will be the 54th Eurovision Song Contest, scheduled to take place between 12 and 16 May 2009 at the Olympic Indoor Arena in Moscow, Russia.

VERY IMPORTANT: Changes in the voting procedure will occur with the re-introduction of a national jury alongside televoting.

Here are some of this year's participants:

Finland with a not-so-Lordiish song featuring a guy lying on the ground:

YouTube Video

Latvia with the best lyrics ever.
The four-wheeled steel-boxes are stuck
And all of a sudden, I see a girl up there
Jumping from roof to roof
Jumping just like that - from Mercedes to Volvo:

YouTube Video

And Romania with the Balkan Girls that apparently can party like nobody like nobody:

YouTube Video

However, it's hard to beat Serbia this year :eye:

YouTube Video

For a good Eurovision blog featuring all of the videos, go here:
Popbitch eurovision

See you in Moscow!

I had no idea we put Waldo's People up. Good god we've sunk low now.

Norway are the runaway favourites so far this year with odds as low as 5/2 in some places. Betting tips here.

Top trivia:

Only one song since 1999 has won that wasn't sung in English (Serbia 2007).

Fly On The Wings Of Love by the Olsen Brothers is one of the most successful Eurovision tracks ever. Covered by XTM, it had 8 weeks in the UK top 10.

2001 winner Estonia is the only time a black artist has won Eurovision. Dave Benton was originally from Aruba.

Volare is the most successful Eurovision song. It only came 3rd, and then went on to be the only song sung in Italian to top the US Billboard 100.

Popbitch.com is as ever chock full of Eurovision nonsense, check it out if you're interested in the competition at all.

Yes, Waldo's People is awesome - making a comeback from the 90's and they still sound the same.

Too bad I don't have television, so can't really watch the live show. It was always fun staying up all night watching this crap. =D

Ah, don't worry, there will be tons of live streams.

The semi-finals are over. Here is a map showing the final participants (green) and those who failed in the semi-finals (red):

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/3848/mapakb.jpg

Everything is set for the big event tomorrow (8pm GMT). The participants are already in Moscow and the mayor just forbid any gay parades in the capital.

It's a disaster that Terry Wogan won't be this year's commentator anymore, though (he stepped down from his role after 35 years). Graham Norton will take over this year, let's see how he's doing.

A commentated live broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest will be available worldwide via satellite by broadcaster streams such as Croatia's HRT Sat, Macedonia's MKTV Sat, Serbia's RTS Sat. Additionally, the official Eurovision Song Contest website also will provide a live stream without commentary via the peer to peer medium Octoshape.

I really hope Norway doesn't win, it's such a cynical, empty grab at the title with absolutely no integrity, and considering it's the Eurovision, that's saying a lot. The guy isn't even fucking Norwegian, it's bullshit. It really pisses me off that he's playing the violin too, obviously because last year the Russians won with a violin player. Maybe they should make him wear a scary halloween mask and get a sex change while they're at it.

I for one am rooting for Moldova.

I made an entry the other day giving my praise to Finland's act though I haven't heard of them prior to this.

If you got an SA account, it's the only time in the year to visit the SA forums again:

The Something Awful Forums

Eurovision chat: #eurovision on irc.synirc.net

http://ablegoy.com/ESC2009_EN.pdf (!)

If you are very drunk, you might also want to come to #gfchat tonight.

Go azerbaijan!
Arash<3

Last year's entry of Azerbaijan rocked, this year uhh I dunno...

No gimmick metal bands this year :( Teräsbetoni was hilarious last time around. Here's hoping there'll be some awesome-but-terrible visuals again, Russia's entry last year had me laughing forever.

See, I wish it was easier to see Eurovision in America. It seems so much more enjoyable than American Idol.

Normally I would be in gff chat by now since this is one of my fave events, but the chat plugin is crashing my broswers. Guess I better go and dust off my copy of irc I have somewhere.

Edit: 1st for Norway and 5th place for UK? Very big shock result for us, I thought the rest of europe hated the UK's guts.

Hell, 5th place. Pretty chuffed with that.

Was pretty clear by about the 5th country of voting that Norway were going to win. Not an overly great song, but it is quite a catchy tune.

Wow, 20th place for Germany. A lot higher than expected.

The contest was okay this year. Gold for Norway, silver for Iceland - fuck Eastern Europe Balkan Block mothercockers

Lol sweden flopped again. Next year they should go with Arash and end up in top 3. Although he will never win the swedish contest since Swedes are fucking stupid.

Well, winning this has always been a dubious honor...

In any case, hooray democracy!

I didn't really like Norway's song but it's been the favourite for months so I'm not surprised it won. I kinda liked Finland's entry, it was early-90's-rave-tastic! Our entry sounded like every other song Lloyd-Webber's ever written but I guess he's a multi-millionaire for a reason. I thought it was quite funny how Denmark's song was written by Ronan Keating and they chose a dude who looks and sings just like Ronan to sing it. Why not just have Ronan himself?

The interval show was awesome. One day when I own a nightclub I'm going to have a clear bottomed swimming pool built into the ceiling with hardly any water in it and fit honeys diving backwards and forwards all night. It was one of the best Eurovision's I've seen for ages, props to Russia for that.

I also liked Finland's entry (Waldo's People, lol), but apparently, Europe didn't like it since it got even less points than Germany, which is quite an achievement these days. I didn't really get the interval show, but the reason for that might be that I was pretty drunk at eleven.

How was it the first time without Wogan, by the way?

It's not quite the same with Graham Norton. Although he's quite funny, it sounded a bit like he had a few jokes written in advance and whilst he's quite amusingly bitchy about a lot of the acts, he lacks Wogan's out and out rudeness and incredulity. Also, he kept talking over the pre-recorded inserts which to be honest weren't very funny anyway but they didn't quite silence them and hearing two people talking over each other is annoying as hell.

It was quite weird that Duncan from Blue was reading out our scores. Firstly, because I didn't realise we were having even a minor celebrity to spend 30 seconds not giving any opints to France and secondly because he went that whole 30 seconds without reminding everyone he was Duncan from Blue.

Well, the best part about the voting was that instant joke machine called Laka from Bosnia (I think he participated in the ESC last year or the year before) and that blatantly homosexual pimp from Latvia with that red shirt and the tons of hair on his chest.

Who was it who made that "Funny" minute's silence joke? I honestly thought he was going to carry that on for the full minute.

At least the voting only takes half an hour now rather then in the old days when it took basically forever.