Meme ganked from Narcissima and tweaked:

If you had to liken me to one or two characters (of whatever sex, species and so on) from any comic, movie, TV show, book and so on - who would it be, and why?

---

Finland's Euroviz entry has me wanting to go on another E-Type binge. <3 E-Type.

If Sweden could sing properly in her normal voice, I would've wanted her to win, but she sounded very weak (worse in the final performance, not the one linked; I'd say her operatic voice sounded better in the final, though). <3 Sweden anyway; always guaranteed for a great show.

Full marks to the BBC for their subtitle and red button coverage, as you'd expect from a compulsive viewer of subtitles. Although I did spot a few errors... ;)

And Norton, well, I'm happy to be proved wrong. He was good! Maybe it was knowing that most of his audience are gay or gay-friendly, so he doesn't try so hard with the "lol camp dicks omg p00fz0rs" stuff, or maybe he was trying to emulate Wogan, but he gave a great commentary, funny and biting while maintaining a semblance of dignity. Until the voting, because he actually seemed to care if we won. lol.

View the original post at HellHound.net

...Oh my stars and tri-corner hat. This is possibly the greatest thing I've heard this week.

I found the CD on the stairs today after I got home. I assume Slen dropped it round for me. ♥

Wolves of the Sea with Caribbean Monkey Island stylings. If I could get horny, that would be making me very much so.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Every worship programme I see led by Canon Chris Chivers now makes me think of this.

Connectivity issues at home seem to continue... please let me know if I've missed anything major in anyone's life or LiveJournal because I am unlikely to catch up anytime soon. If you've emailed me I'll try to get to it soon.

Theatrics

Other than that, this was a fun long weekend. On Saturday Slen and Paul hustled me out of the house in smug secrecy and we headed to the Lowry, where I discovered we were seeing... um. This, actually.

Yes, a Eurovision Song Contest parody musical. Absolutely [insane|hilarious]. I shall show you clips, although these are not from the performance and cast we saw. Here's the chavtastic UK entry, 'I Love to Love to Love (Love)'. And Hungary's 'Little Birds' ("Today I killed a chicken and ate its entrails. Mmm, entrails!").

Here also are the Russians with 'Ice Queen', which I'm sorry to say I recognised instantly as a rip on Northern Girl (er, what can I say, songs about ice really do it for me), and which also caused me to utter the line "In Soviet Russia, skirt rips you off", leaving the others in, um, stitches.

The source for Sweden's 'Same Old Song' is pretty obvious from the second you hear the opening piano line. Iceland... yes. Oh, and the 'German techno' is absolutely flipping adorable. Makes me want to hug the entirety of Germany. So that was that. Oh, and they have the mp3s on their site, downloadable under a Creative Commons licence, if you register.

Tonsorial

On Saturday morning I lost 45cm of hair from my head. Have had no difficulty adjusting to the short haircut. I keep forgetting I've had it cut, actually.

Don't ask for pics until I've trained it to lie back more successfully. At the moment the front keeps forming itself into curtains, despite wax, because my hair is very thick and soft and the last inch or so always curls.

I also do not know why the hairdresser gave me teddy-boy sideburns. (*may be exaggeration caused by Mutt not being used to it yet)

Eurovizh

Eurovision itself, well, bah. We've no choice now; it has to be a return to the judges system. I don't see why we should continue to fund a "how many borders have you got?" contest (or, indeed, a "please don't re-invade us" contest, as the guys'n'I called it) and none of the happy little bloc voters can afford to keep it afloat without Western Europe's backing. In practice the phone votes will have to stay because they raise so much money, but they should only make up a small part of the overall score.

The UK's entry was out of place. It was a real song, and a boring song (I didn't like it much), so I don't care that it did badly. What really has me steaming is that Latvia didn't place highly. What is not awesome about a bunch of smelly pirates?

(Digression: it has the word "wolves" in the title, causing me to wonder idly if Finnish Telecom's records would show about 80 votes for Latvia from Tony Kakko's number. Tony luvs wolves like I love pirate pandas and pickpocket pangolins.)

Well, no point getting steamed about the votes, though, because in the end the ones we liked (Finland, Greece* etc) go on our mix tape and hang the rest.

* My private version of this Greek chorus begins "My secret combination, it's 1 2 3 4″ and you may be able to guess the rest. Also, "I'm not a little girl"? YES YOU ARE.

Giggage

Ohohoho. Speaking of pirate music, I don't think I've blogged yet about Slen's gig last Monday. It was a college gig; Slen was there supporting co-songwriter/co-guitarist John, who is the music student. (They met when both were on the lower version of the same course; John's now doing the further syllabus.) They played their pirate metal song, which is now called Captain Solerno, and a couple of others. They even had a tin-whistle player there for the woodwind line, which was cool.

What was awesome was that their pirate track was played on the radio (yes, I have proof! *clutches mp3*) earlier that day, with a plug for the gig.

The gig overall overran drastically because of the number of students playing. Slen's group didn't have the chance for a sound check beforehand so there was some faffing around before they could play. I can't listen to live music so I can't really say how it went, but I did my best to stir up the crowd by example during the "YARR!"s and suchlike. I also spent some time before writing out slips of paper with their email address on them to add to their sample CDs, then tried to pass those CDs out. I'm hilariously bad at this, really, but oh well, did the supportive sibling thing...

Their set seemed to go down pretty well, especially considering they were on late and running late, so that some of the smallish audience had already started leaving. They played Drunken Sailor for an impromptu encore (making it extremely lucky I'd taught John a couple of verses of it a few days back, ahem). Missed the last tram by far and had to get a taxi. Got home at 01:00 with work the next day. I am so metal. Well, except for the long hair, now.

blah

I've been doing more playing Pokémon than writing, down to general and/or ambient depression I think, but I hope to begin bucking that trend.

Also been eating badly for the same reasons. Hopefully now I'm back at work and online this too should sort itself out. I baked cookies today, they're really bad. So out of practice.

Looking forward to next week, when I'm going with the brothers to Chester Zoo (which has GUESS WHAT?) and Alton Towers. Don't know yet what we'll do with the other days.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Iran rounds up Bahai leaders. Lovely.

---

Oh, more charming. People burnt as witches in Kenya.

---

Tasmanian tiger DNA implanted in mousies.

---

Cat gatecrashes concert (vid)

---

Ravens fledging in Scotland and disappearing in Lancashire.

---

Mixed-sex NHS wards 'still a problem'. Not a problem for me. If I ever have to go inpatient I don't particularly want to be segregated by caste. Besides, there are shockingly few "strange neuter-creatures from the planet Zog" wards.

---

Tram expansion's green light (vid)

---

There is hope for me yet. (brilliant audio)

---

Dog too big to patrol beach (vid) and article

---

In pictures: Senegal's beached whales (distressing images)

---

Exam papers had answers on back. It is unlikely that any of the 12,000 students sitting the examination would have recognised the value of the information in the copyright statement and subsequently used it. Unfortunately probably true, as schools don't teach critical thinking any more, just rote answering. (Yes, I do know this for a fact. What does "don't put it in your own words, just make sure you write down every point with no waffle" sound like to you? From a good mid-league independent secondary school?)

---

'Trust drug' may cure social phobia and help autism. Ooh! Just what I need, to be more trusting and less alert to manipulative, untrustworthy bzsatards!

---

Whole scelidosaurus on show to public. Just in case you needed to be informed, ankys are the best dinosaurs EVER and you should adopt one, because every party needs a tank.

---

Churches boo-hoo-hoo over the fact that despite all their sound and fury, everyone's ignoring them. Since the topic at hand doesn't concern them one jot (besides, never mind my relationships, I definitely don't want a church anywhere near my children!), this is a healthy thing for society and makes me feel more positive than I have for a long time.

If we ever feel the need to pass any more laws about precisely how trefoil the invisible magic friend is, or who's not allowed to eat the invisible magic friend's flesh, we'll give you a call, 'kay?

---

We're asking the public what is the most respectful and appropriate way to display them. ... The majority of the comments have been that we shouldn't cover them up. So what did we do? Oh yes: Egyptian mummies are covered up

---

I'm gonna throw this one over to Charlycrash. *Erisian smile*

---

Supernova filmed LIVE! (Well, timeshifted a bit. Like 100 million years.) More from AP. Squeeeee.

---

Registrars' beliefs make them unfit for their jobs. So, resign. They shouldn't be pandered to and accommodated, because religion is a voluntary disability. Or, to put it another way, if you feel you can't do your job for reasons of conscience, you have a moral duty to resign.

---

Derbyshire couple may have 'oldest' dog (vid)

---

Sesame Street puppets explain war to kids of soldiers (vid)

---

Some punks and goths in Mexico want to beat up emos. (vid)

---

Infrasound may be the cause of shadows during eclipses, rather than atmospheric disturbance. Well, sound is atmospheric disturbance, anyway...

---

New dinosaur tracks discovered

---

Biggest rodent ever... not so big (if that's not ready-made inspiration for Ursula Vernon, nothing is...)

---

The cult of the Eurovision (vid)

View the original post at HellHound.net

OMFD just seen a clip of Latvia. *in LOVE*

See all the entrants on the cool BBC site.

I haven't been following Eurovision news at all this year, but --

How come nobody told me it was Teräsbetoni?!?

Man, I love it when 'our' entry is one for which I can thoroughly root.

(Charlyboy, you'll like these guys. They're Manowar with lulz.)

Originally published at HellHound.net. You can comment here or there.

They need to bring back the judging panels or some other method that isn’t open to misuse quite that blatant.

(Not that I wanted the UK to win - our song was, obviously, naff - but some of the western European countries deserved to place better.)

I watched the tape of the heat with my bandmate earlier the same day, then watched the show live with him and his bro.

Being able to say “She just said ‘how are you’ and they said ‘fine thanks’” was fun. (I kinda wish I didn’t have this number-blindness. I can’t count backwards from three, apparently, without getting a couple of them the wrong way ’round.)

Not much to say about the entries… I saw a lot of Ruslana-esque adorableness sloshing around, a face type that is seemingly deliberately designed to get round my stoic filters, which was a little disturbing. And Sweden, well, eye candy yay.

Really most of the actual songs fell flat for me. I have secret luv for Denmark’s Drama Queen, but because of the aforementioned imbalance it didn’t get through the semis. For me, Germany and Iceland should have won or come close. Hungary close on their heels. I was eager to like Finland (naturally) if only her song had been anywhere near catchy. I was frightened of Belarus (but the dancers on the white things were fun). Spain and Greece were surprisingly good and, well, Switzerland, what can you say… except “go away, WOD nerds”?

About the winner? I sort of half-assedly wave a “yay lesbians” flag, but really, it was just so blah!

Terry Wogan (a Radio 2 DJ and the English Eurovision commentator) told an ancedote on the radio about his first arrival in Finland, when someone apparently told him that the way to say “Sorry, I don’t speak Finnish” is “minä rakastan sinua”. He said it made him popular instead of getting punched, so I am slightly skeptical…

Oh, and finally - JOULUPUKKI WTF?