cleaverb!s world

Thanks to the local library for giving us this chance to say hello.
We have been going through our collections of music, randomly listening
to anything and everything. Wow. Life without the .net is different.
Our recent listening has been mostly 1980s stuff, including The Hooters,
Art Of Noise, and The Fixx. We have recorded a few albums from cassette tape,
and preparing to record some songs from vinyl...

we definitely will not be back until september, at the earliest...

Not much happening on YouTube these days, Diva Spicy added several
Despoina Vandi songs, and there are a few Helena Paparizou spots.
Of course the big news is that our videos went over 4,000,000 views.
Four million views, that is a medium sized city! It does appear that
the views for our La Femme D'argent video have tapered off to a few thousand
per day now. Fun while it lasted. I did notice that YouTube finally
'gave back' my international statistics - for a few months all I could see
was the data for the USA. Nice to see our Greece and German stats again.

We spent a few nights watching the WCWS games on television.
And then we went on another 'movie binge' you can view a list
of movie titles we recently watched on our Vox blog.

We have been updating our favorite movies of the 2000s and we also added a few
titles to our favorite black and white movies. Also note that we changed the web url , just to clear up some clutter we put them in another directory.

Hoho, an americans votes. You can't vote. Can you ? I don't know.
This is what I wrote down while the voting period was progressing.
It took me 5 tries to get the order 'something' to how i felt.
Then we were surprised how low Cyprus went, and how high Denmark finished.
For the past few years, Turkey and Romania have been 'vote getters'.
This year was no different.
Here is who I liked, and how the points disperse:
12 points toooo - Greece . They finished 8th with 140 votes.
10 points to - Cyprus . They finished 21st with 27 votes.
8 points to Moldova . They finished 22nd with 27 votes.
7 points to Germany . They finished 1st with 246 votes.
6 points to Serbia . They finished 13th with 72 votes.
5 points to Belgium . They finished 6th with 143 votes.
4 points to Albania . They finished 16th with 62 votes.
3 points to Romania . They finished3rd with 162 votes.
2 points to Georgia . They finished 9th with 136 votes.
1 points to Ukraine . They finished 10th with 108 votes.

I wanted to give more,more,more. So I listed a top 20:
11 France They finished 12th with 82 votes.
12 Russia They finished 11th with 90 votes.
13 Bosnia and Herzegovina They finished 17th with 51 votes.
14 Belarus They finished 24th with 18 votes.
15 Turkey They finished 2nd with 170 votes.
16 Denmark They finished 4th with 149 votes.
17 Spain They finished 15th with 68 votes.
18 Iceland They finished 19th with 41 votes.
19 Portugal They finished 18th with 43 votes.
20 Ireland They finished 23rd with 25 votes.

I found it slightly surprising that Russia gave 12 points to Georgia.
For our top songs, 1-4 were the easy part. After those, we wanted to vote
for France...but they ended up 11th on our list.
........READ ON FOR MORE ABOUT OUR ESC 2010 FINALS .........

We hope you were one of the 'over 120 million' people who watched the Eurovision
finals on May 29th, 2010. I see www.eurovision.tv has released the voting results for the semi-finals . Finnland and Malta came in 11th and 12th in the first.
http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=18323
And Sweden just missed out; Croatia needed double their votes, and Slovenia
amassed 6 total votes. And if that was bad, Swiss only received 2 votes.

Now for the Finals, and all I can remember is Germanys' Lena - Satellite is the winner ! Congratulations, and we know next years show will be grand.

I'll get back to more about the finals voting in another post. Here are my notes
on tonights performances:
1 Azerbaijan - She sang well and the dancers did fine. was not impressed.
2 Spain - Great performance, singing . No votes as usual ?
3 Norway - he can sing.Nothing great.
4 Moldova - Beautiful. The music is kind of jumpy,vocals and dance Great.
5 Cyprus - Great song and performance. Maybe too good for ESC.
6 Bos & Herz - The message 'melt the ice' my playback started looping over.
7 Belgium - So intimate, and a crowd favorite? He did great.
8 Serbia - My playback was skipping..so simple a song and great fun.
9 Belarus - Their english was very good tonight. A delicate song, so deserving.
10 Ireland - Very crisp native english vocals. Very good song.
11 Greece - I love the music tempo,the dance, and the leads confidence.
12 UK - So friendly and polite. Kind of 'blah' performance.
13 Georgia - Wonderful song and singer.
14 Turkey - Opening vocals were hard to hear. Pretty good act.
15 Albania - Great lead singer, and a solid performance.
16 Iceland - Sounds terrific yet not much of a song.
17 Ukraine - Very strong vocalist. I listened intently,and its a good song.
18 France - Smile! Not much of a song, just fun to watch and hear.
19 Romania - Um speechless. They are great in the performance.
20 Russia - A great band. The song doesn't stir my emotions at all.
21 Armenia - Not my type of music. Wonderful hair!
22 Germany - Lena,Lena chants before she started. Really classy music.Happy.
23 Portugal - Hard to hear her opening vocals, she finishes strong.
24 Israel - definitely not my type of music.
25 Denmark - By now, i just want it to be over. Very good song performance.
And then, for some reason Spain did a repeat performance.
I had several problems with playback; songs 8,9,10,12,13,14,16,21,24,and 25.
Apart from Lena, and the Russian dirge, there wasn't much 'cheer' or humor
in the show. It was all drama. Yet the music is a great collection of
diverse talents.
Alright, I am going to end this post. And I will reveal my 'vote' next.

Well, the eurovision.tv servers must have had a full load tonight. Me, I got wrapped up in a project, and missed
the first 6 songs. I should have been on in time for Switzerland, but I kept getting 'blank' pages from the
website. I mean blank, nothing there. when we finally did get a page, it had no CSS. No style.
The website did a fantastic job, by providing an alternate page; one without the FaceBook feeds.
My contest was flawless ! Thanks and hope to see you for the final.
So, for the first six songs, all I had to judge them by was the 'snippet' they showed while the voting occurs.
Here is my notes:
1 Lithuania fun.
2 Armenia - well not enough to form an opinion.
3 Israel - they usually have a great vocalist. Not enough clip to judge.
4 Denmark - great song .
5 Switzerland - why do they always seem to be out of style ? my apologies for that.
6 Sweden - good, but not great. missed the performance.
We did get to see the rest of the show:
7 Azerbijan - Nothing special , and not bad. First song we heard of tonights show.
8 Ukraine - She performed well. song was unimpressive.
9 Netherlands - I loved it.Best Dutch performance I ever saw. GOOD
10 Romania - It was a simple song, performed well. Nothing bad.
11 Slovenia - That was awesome. Song, costumes, performance=WOW. GOOD
12 Ireland - Started out great. The song was too long for me. It kind of dragged on.
13 Bulgaria - Not much of a song.
14 Cyprus - In English! Great performance. GOOD
15 Croatia - They are great! Would anyone vote for Croatia ? (no)
16 Georgia - That 'wink' was superb. GOOD Probably bomb in the finals ?
17 Turkey - So average a song and group. But really GOOD.

When it was all over, and nine countries had advanced, I had to wish for the Netherlands to get in.
They didn't. I figured Sweden would get it. They didn't. The tenth winner was Denmark.

Overall, Greece was the best song. However, I do not think they will win.
Tonight, Cyprus topped my memory of Belgiums song. We will see who gets more votes in the final.
The Turks could do well with a better performance...and
Romania deserves another look.
I am afraid Ireland will probably be in last place...but I wish you the best of luck.

Albania, Moldova, Belarus, and Georgia will probably be middle of the final list.
Serbia, one of the few 'young guys' needs to find the magic, and the Azerbijan and German young ladies
are certain to get many votes. I am leaving out of few contestants, but France has a great song,
Spain has a pretty good song, and the UK song is very good.