It’s the 2nd-most wonderful time of the year

Posted On May 21, 2018

I am a week late writing this up but I am once again going to talk about the joy of the Eurovision Song Contest. There’s also some photos and rambling about other stuff.

Kadek hosted Eurovision as usual, and I met a dog! Her housemates have a puppy now. She’s a mix of a dachshund and something else (I think) so she is very tiny, and she has these adorable eyebrow dots. But I also still love Smudge the cat.

I don’t know why I just couldn’t get a picture of the drinking rules sign that wasn’t blurry as hell.

Now it’s time for my yearly commentary on the songs!

Israel actually won! The bookies thought it was going to win for ages before the contest, but I was still pleasantly surprised. I don’t let myself hear the songs before the semi-finals (and don’t hear the Big 5 before the grand final), so when I finally did hear it miles after everybody else, I wasn’t sure I actually liked it. But it grew on me in the couple of days left before the final, and I was really pumped when it won.

People are focusing on the “chicken noises” aspect and not the fact that the song is actually about women being sexually assaulted. People are vowing never to watch Eurovision again because part of a song reminded them of chickens.

Nobody made the same vow when a Ukranian white supremacist won with a song lamenting Nazis being kicked out of Crimea, but OK buddy.

There is no conspiracy, this song won the audience voting by miles. As far as I can remember, this is only the 2nd time that a song I voted for won Eurovision! The other time of course being when Lorine Talhaoui (Loreen) won for Sweden in 2012.

Also, Netta is a Mizrahi Jew like yours truly!

I was excited for Yulia Samoylova to return after being disallowed by Ukraine last year. I guess I wanted to see another wheelchair user on stage. The song didn’t get through the semi-finals (so I looked a bit of a pillock at the party in my Russia-print dress) and apparently Yulia became very unhappy about doing Eurovision anyway. As a song, it was OK. It was written by Israelis!

I thought these hats looked a bit neckbeardy, and Lukas Meijer looks like a poor man’s Jared Leto (whose name I could not for the life of me remember at the time, so me pointing at the screen and shouting “He looks like that man!” was probably very unhelpful). The actual melody of the song is likeable enough though.

Cyrpus this year was represented by Albanian-born Greek-national singer Eleni Foureira (Entela Fureraj). This song was probably my second-favourite. Her hair texture is better than mine. I feel like the music video doesn’t really match the tone of the song and there should be more sun in it.

I like how about 1 minute in this song becomes about manly noises. The main singer also has a very Danish forehead. This song seemed to be a favourite among people I spoke to about Eurovision, but didn’t actually do all that well in the contest as a whole.

I would have liked Slovenia’s song a lot more if they hadn’t done the tacky pretend-technical-difficulty thing on stage. That just kind of turned me off of the whole thing. The giant head in the music video does remind me of that Fatman Scoop song though.

Melovin’s stage name apparently comes from a combination of Halloween, and Alexander McQueen’s surname (????). His sound gives me a general Cure vibe. Also he’s only 21, bless him. It might’ve looked better if he was swapped out with the guy from Georgia’s (I think) band who looked like an actual vampire.

I think this was my joint 2nd-favourite with Cyprus. Zhana Bergendorff doesn’t seem to wear that wig all the time, so I don’t know if they were trying to go for a Dihaj vibe (especially as their song is called Bones and the former’s was called Skeletons).

Their stage performance definitely had the best ending, although probably only the television audiences at home got to see that effect.

But also

I hope Equinox do more stuff with a similar sound because I quite like it.

Hungary’s song was OK, although all the pyrotechnics at the Eurovision performance made me go all Lucille Bluth about whether the main singer was gonna set his hair on fire.

I should probably put a disclaimer at the end here pointing out that, I am deaf and my hearing loss can have a very significant impact on me. When I listen to songs I liked years ago, they sound different because there are parts I can no longer hear. So, I might be hearing something a bit different to you and I apologise if you have no idea what I’m on about in regard to certain songs.

The UK’s song this year wasn’t the worst thing ever but it also wasn’t that exciting; SuRie did a fine performance that was unfortunately upstaged by a Corbynista activist storming on and stealing her microphone to rant about the UK media being Nazis (apparently irony is lost on him).

I was disappointed in Waylon as the Netherlands’ entry; he was one half of the duo The Common Linnets a few years ago and they had a lovely song, this one was just a bit awful.

Last year’s winner Salvador Sobral (a.k.a. the most boring man in the entire world) got super up his own ass since winning, slagged-off other singers, and then threw a fit when Netta won because “nothing has changed since I won!”. Imagine being arrogant enough to think not only that Eurovision would change to be your kind of music, but actually SHOULD?!

I am quite determined to visit Eurovision 2019 in person. It depends on me and Kadek being able to sort out the logistics and the money, but it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit both Israel and the Eurovision Song Contest in one go, we’d be mad not to do it.

✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️✡️

Now I’m afraid Letti is gonna have to do you a learnin’, because the world is once again full of shit about Israel.

“Next year in Jerusalem” is a Jewish phrase that is said all the fucking time, especially around the table during celebrations, it reflects the thousands of years that the diaspora has spent wanting to return to Jerusalem. I imagine it is a bit of a thorny thing to hear for those of you who like to deny that Jews are from Judea, though. Netta was not giving a “political jab” when she said “next year in Jerusalem” when she won, she was reciting a standard Jewish celebration.

This is actually Israel’s 4th Eurovision win, and all the other times that Israel has hosted (most recently 1999) were in Jerusalem.

And apparently Israel shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate receiving the most votes in a singing competition because . . . terrorists are rioting in Gaza. I don’t know how much simpler this situation can be made for people. These are not civilians protesting in front of an inanimate fence. These are 30,000 armed terrorists with knives, rocket launchers, hatchets, guns (the bullets from which have hit Jewish houses in Sderot), and firebombs flown on swastika-branded kites, trying to breach the border of the nation of Israel. And they are not trying to breach it merely to go for a stroll. They are trying to breach it so that they can kill all the Jews. Hamas were so confident that they were going to be able to do this that they planned victory speeches inside Israel.

They have OPENLY SAID that this is about killing Jews.

gaza rioters want to kill jews — How much more of an admission do you need.

So you don’t think that people hacking down the border fence of a nation should be shot while doing it? Fine, you can demonstrate that when Hamas is finally in your neighbourhood, you can bend over backwards as they slit your throat to demonstrate your commitment to not shooting anybody. But the Jews aren’t going to do that for you, never again. The Jews are not going to stand there passively while the fence around Israel comes down and 30,000 armed men run into their homes.

It’s time to admit that you swallow such obvious falsehoods from the media because you just hate Jews. You refuse to learn anything about Israel because you just don’t want to, you want to hate it.
If it doesn’t matter to you that there is footage of Gazans pretending to be shot, footage of them bouncing right back up off their stretchers after photos have been taken of them looking injured, footage proving that “disabled” rioters are anything but as they suddenly start jumping around, guess what, you just hate Jews. You are willing to overlook the scummiest behaviour in the world so that you can continue being against Israel.

Gaza hasn’t been part of Israel since 2005, when it became a Jew-free area for the first time in 3,000 years as all known Jews were forcefully evicted.

Gazans are in charge of themselves. Despite this, Israel is blamed for everything about them. It’s Israel’s fault that a border fence went up because Gazans wouldn’t stop going into Israel and blowing themselves up. It’s Israel’s fault that the stated goal of Gazans is to kill all Jews. Amazing how that works, isn’t it.

And I’m going to resist a long rant about the “West Bank,” and about how the Muslim population of it and Gaza do not even speak the same fucking language as each other (because there were no “Palestinians” before Muslims migrated from Egypt and Syria, two very different countries). They can’t even pronounce “Palestine,” it was a name given to the area by the occupying Romans as a biblical insult to the indigenous Jews. That was 400 years before Islam even existed, and 100 after the death of Jesus.

Jews belong to Israel. It doesn’t matter that some of them got expelled to Europe and became a bit paler over generations. They are still Israelites, now and forever. More than 50% of Israel is Mizrahi Jews who were never remotely white. Israel was never completely empty of Jews, there were ALWAYS some who managed to stay behind. Jews have continuously been in Israel for the last 3,000 years, and their capital is Jerusalem.

Look at this long-ass list of expulsions and blood libels against Jews. The list does not include all the massacres and pogroms, like the Farhud perperated by the Iraqis in June 1941. The only place that Jews can securely live is Israel, and they sure as hell have got to defend its borders.

The Jewish nation is Israel, and that nation, represented by Netta at the Eurovision Song Contest, was voted by the viewing public of European Broadcasting Union areas to win the whole competition. Jews have the right to host the next song contest, in their own land, in their own capital, and I sure as hell am gonna be there when they do it.

Other stuff:

But perhaps the most perfect badge of all is one about nachos.

I found the collar put by for my next dog in the chest of stuff the other week. It’ll probably be a few years before it sees any use, but I like it anyway, the stars glow in the dark as well as reflect light.

Recently, I discovered that there was a craft thing I could probably do. I came across a video on YouTube about somebody making their own pin-badges with shrink film, and it utterly inspired me.

I realised I could not only make pins for niches that were hard to buy for (e.g. Ananas, our Lord), but I could also make jewellery and stuff!

I decided to make some keyrings to sort Will’s keys out, make a present for my sister (actually based on something I tried to get for her from Etsy years ago, but I got a refund because the seller never sent them. Avoid the GEEKcastle shop!), a couple of pins for Kadek, and some Ananas drop earrings.

Started by printing out enlarged and brightened pictures onto shrink plastic.

Punching holes, because this can’t be done once they’ve gone hard.

The next part is tricky because you have to put them in the oven on cardboard for about three minutes, and then quickly swap them out but also manage to flatten the hot ones, etc. I managed to burn my fingers on random metal bits of the oven, I guess because I needed reminding why I can’t cook for myself.

Applying the Dimensional Magic later on was what I THOUGHT was going to be the best part.

Can you see the problem that I’m seeing?

So, disappointingly, the Mod Podge made my ink run on the shrink plastic. I read that this doesn’t happen with Epson inks, and I happen to have an Epson printer so thought I was all good in that aspect. But alas, the inks were apparently running not long after the Dimensional Magic went down.

Unfortunately all but one of my pins got coated, so they are all ruined and all need making again. My Abe’s Oddysee one didn’t get coated yet, so I have the opportunity to experiment and see if sealing it with hairspray will help.

I would leave them entirely unsealed since they look so nice like that, but I fear the designs would get scratched off eventually.

I got another wave of inspiration recently when reading Outside the Not So Big House. I realised that screened porches are super interesting and sound awesome to have, especially in the summer.

You see where this is going.

I incorporated the idea of a screened porch into our house plan, without changing the overall shape of the house. Which meant that it went above part of the veranda conservatory. The whole family would be allowed to hang out in it, it would just be accessed through our bedroom.

I decided to hand-draw the plan in my bullet journal because it gave me a bit more freedom and nuance than making it online for the billionth time. You may notice that my ability to sketch anything goes completely out the window when it comes to the markings for double-swing doors.