Good stuff

Well, we did it--we watched the Eurovision contest last night, and it was as bad as expected. Maybe even worse. All we could think is that we wish our friends back home could have seen it. For ancestral pride, I did much better than Gretchen as the band from Norway finished a respectable ninth--just behind the pseudo-Swiss entry--but Germany finished...LAST (and deservedly so). (After watching the Norwegian band, I still can't figure out for the life of me whether they were serious or trying to do an '80s hair-band version of Spinal Tap.) Perhaps the biggest surprise--especially given the preponderance of really bad former Eastern bloc boy bands and equally bad but beautiful women--was the woman from Malta finishing second. (Surprising because (a) she looked a bit like Mama Cass Elliot--think big--and (b) Malta doesn't exactly have a natural geographic voting bloc of support. As a matter of fact, I consistently forget where Malta is located, other than that it's somewhere in the Mediterranean. To the extent that I ever think of Malta at all, that is.) The night's big winner was the woman from Greece. I'm not complaining, and that's all I'm going to say about the lovely Helena...