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.

ESC 2010 OSLO First Semi-Final
For the first few somgs, I was cheerily surprised to hear such a vast display of ethnic music.
This was a good contest, although nothing real exciting to talk about.
I had a terrible time with my connection. But it got better once i figured out the FaceBook
feed was feeding me crap , and messing up my audio/video of the contest..
In firefox, I right clicked and selected 'Block Images from FaceBook' .
I didn't have any problem after that. Well the sound was out of sync for a minute.
After all was done, I only had nine contestants that I marked as GOOD.
All that aside, my notes:

1 Moldova - GOOD. That's all i wrote down. They may have been second only to Greece.
2 Russia - ...my feed was too bad to judge. A cool ethnic sound.
3 Estonia - very pop song, had a nasty echo or loop that was disorienting. Was that intentional?
4 Slovakia - Dark song. My feed jumped into Finlands song before this was over.
5 Finnland - I liked it ! The performance felt like Abba was back in the contest. GOOD.
6 Latvia - She can sing well. But screeches at times, and the song was too slow.
7 Serbia - Good, clean fun song. A popstar in the making. GOOD
8 Bosnia & Herzegovina - Would have loved to hear it. I rebooted because my connection was bad.
9 Poland I got back just in time to hear ...next country is Belgium... my feed had lagged so far behind.
10 Belgium - Reminded me of James Taylor; a man and his guitar, on stage with a microphone. GOOD
11 Malta - GOOD
12 Albania - Cool song and performer.GOOD
13 Greece - Pretty awesome song. GOOD
14 Portugal - A true ballad type song, and a fine vocalist.
15 Macedonia - The song seemed so out of place and cold. Like a rap artist on family hour.
16 Belarus - For once, I think they did GOOD.
17 Iceland - The audio jumped all over when i was watching/listening. GOOD

The qualifiers : Bosnia&Herzegovina, Moldova, Russia, Greece, Portugal, Belarus, Serbia, Belgium,
Albania and Iceland .

The contest didn't seem to have as many shots of the crowd 'flag waving' as in past years.
That is good. The atmosphere was very much like a family gathering. Very sweet, indeed.
What was lacking was a young man, or woman seeking the crowds approval. nobody requested
'hands in the air' or tried to make a statement. And each performer received nearly the same amount
of applause. There was no apparent 'crowd favorite' , as far as i could tell.

The Estoniis seemed to have dropped a horrible acapella number, where they usually have a vote getter.
Belarus took a huge leap forward. Greece has a veteran performer again, and he is excellent.
Belgium. Alas, they got in to the finals. Never have i seen Belgium make the finals. WTG .
I felt so bad for the Russians, and then 'surprise' they made the final.

After all songs were over, and finally I heard the 5 automatic qualifiers clips.
The UK song sounds good, I had to look to see who Germany was, Spain I could tell,
and I don't remember France or Norways songs.

I'm sure it seems rather trivial as to what operating system we use to write and upload our web pages. Yet, this is a first: our
May 18,2010 front page
marks the first time we did not use a Windows application.

We are spending more time working with linux. It's not that much different.
All of our 'files' are still in our Windows folders, so we feel kind of naked.
We are using our Tumblr
blog to write our opinions and likes/dislikes of the Vector Linux 6.0 KDE Classic
distro we installed a couple of days ago.

There are so many important things IRL we need to attend to right now. Wish us good luck. We hope to have some Eurovision favorites and story links in our next post.

The YouTube scene has been pretty quiet. The MySpace scene is quiet also. Facebook is busy 'linking' everything to absolutely confound you as to what people write in their profiles...maybe ?

Our pages are probably out-of-date.
We noticed a new Despina Vandi forum created at http://www.devaqueen.gr/ , and they have uploaded several Despina videos on YouTube . We wonder if the creaters came from the abandoned despinavandi.info site. can't say.

We were thinking about creating a 'default' front page.
For these times when we have no news. That way people who are new to cleaverb.net can get an idea of what we offer.
But here we are playing games at pogo, again.

We are distracted by http://www.pogo.com new Risk game.
So we created a

Pogo Risk page, and added a few help pages
and then... we worked in our 'old' Linux to update our software.
that was quite an experience, for a windows user.

We are getting ready to try Microsofts' Security essentials,
just to keep our Windows partition protected.
Yet we intend to switch entirely into Linux before June.

We still have to wait 1 month for Eurovision 2010 frmo Oslo.
News and videos have been slow. And we have been playing games at Pogo
almost without end. Through the boredom, we started a new blog on
Tumblr for our computer and
software writings. If you didn't know, you can follow of our blog RSS
feeds from our
myRSS page. We will have to add the Tumblr link to a few pages..

We finally updated the page style for our game tributes on
cleaverb.org website.
The Star Wars:Empire at War page seems to look much better. Also the Slay,
World Empire, and the
Zone 66 pages have all been updated. And relocated to a different URLs.
I had forgot that we ever made a Scrabble page and a
Monopoly page.
Well that's all we have for now... I can't say when our next cleaverb.net update will be...

We are here. There isn't much to write about. There are few new videos on the Nu Virgos YouTube channel.

We added some material to our La Femme page .
Not much, except going through the video frame by frame to pick out details. and several links about the earthquake and its aftermath.

We tried an experiment with our video software, and came up with an
18 gigabyet version of the video. It has more detail. Not practical.
We need to see it on a screen larger than our 17 monitor to decide if it
is any better..

On the homefront, we are playing games at pogo.com .With friends.
There was also a short episode of wiring up a turntable to our computer
to record a few vintage 1980s songs. I had visions of making a playlist
for our site with some of these 'analog' recordings. Will work on a CD for my personal use. No songs that would really interest our readers.
We were thinking about our early musical influences, and it inspired me to dig out our Thomas Dolby , etc etc albums. saga, Cheap Trick,
the Kinks,. You get the idea.
That is it. Catch you later!

I didn't shoot the video. Nor did I write or play the music.
All we did was put them together, and upload them to YouTube.
Our Air - la Femme D'Argent video has gone over 1 million views!
First we found a referring link on
reddit .
Which links to this blog about the video -
carlustblog .
Pretty cool. And we didn't know about AmazonBlogs before.
Then as we looked around in the comments, we found this "reply"
to our video -

San Francisco Market Street 2005 . Sweet mix of transportation .

We are thinking about making a few pages for the video.
Or maybe we will just add the information to our

La Femme project page .
But, man. I think this will require a different page format, and style.
Oh boy. I am really proud of my 'home made' background and free icons
from the "Crystal Clear" collection. And our 'borrowed' mascot
from php Projekt. And Stoja looks sweeter than ever in our homemade
tour photo.
It's a beautiful day outside, spring has arrived.
We are expecting an important call this week. And our time spent working on cleaverb.net will diminish if our summer employment gig becomes reality. Cross your fingers, and hope for the best .

We should be updating our front page today. There is not much to add
at this early hour. There has been a lot of news stories, and Pogo games in our activities. Stay tuned!

There is not much happening on the 'airwaves' right now.
Worth a mention is Leslie-lesite has been updated. The new album seems to be delayed
even farther into the year, now June.

Carla Bruni and her husband Nicholas are in the USA . They will have a closed meeting with President Obama this evening. Carla has made a few 'surprise' visits to schools.

Jenny Berggren uploaded a 29 second video on her Facebook page.
She basically says that she used to be wary of such offerings.
But now she seems to feel that it is a great way to communiate with fans.

Despina Vandi has an official fanpage on Facebook.There are a few.
Not newsworthy, yet there are some cute pictures of her just uploaded today. Recently, she has 'short' hair .. and so the last photo we linked to was in fact a wig. I don't know the reason for the change..
her hair has gone from maybe 2 inches (5cm) to 6 inches (12cm)
since the new year photos we saw of her family.

We are finally getting some nice weather, albeit windy .
Also, we are playing games on Pogo.com very often.
We probably will not have any new updates for the rest of March.
See you in April!

You can view Helena Paparizous new video on her tvhelena account.
And Schiller has an interview uploaded on his schillermusik account.
We have watched a few basketball games the last week...
and for some reason i have developed a bad case of 'bells ringing in my ears' . Tinitis. Other than that, there is not too much new material to
update our page with.

We did update our feeds page with only the up-to-date feeds.
And we finally finished the Rays PB website on retro-mania .
We found out that several pages are missing. We will have to look at
archive.org to see if they have any...we are only missing about 12 pages.

We may not have an update for the rest of March, yet soon we will have
new Despina, Helena, and Leslie songs...and we shall see if VIA-Gra
updates their webpages for their newest member.

And our Blest obsession continues... Funny that the group did not post
a 'happy birthday' post for Anna. They do for each member. Did we get her birthday wrong ? We haven't found any pictures or stories from
the anniversary of the group.

According to rusradio, Tatiana Kotova has left Via-Gra. Rumor is she is pregnant. She will be replaced by Eva Bushmina,, if we spelled that correctly, i don't know yet. The story was posted on March 4th , see it in russian language at - rusradio.ru . The new member will begin her career with the group in April 2010.

Helena Paparizous' new album will be available on March 29th. Check the countdown on her MySpace.

We added a couple of feeds to our News page. Some of the old ones died out.. so we replaced the despinavandi.info with Alena Vinnitskaya official . We also added Svetlana Loboda official, and the Eurovision Rss.

We noticed about 1 month ago that the 'official leslie' website finally changed. They took down the Futur80 artwork, and replaced it with the new album title. No pictures, no information. The site is
hosted by her 'old' record label, so why would they bother ?
If you want more Leslie, she is on Facebook quite often. Well, somebody updates the page...

We do not add links for facebook to our site because;
Facebook requires you to log in . We only list sites that allow
visitors who can be anonymous.

Ah, Razoom added a new video to their youtube account. It is good.
Air will be in North American tour for the month of March...
Mr Meeble added a nice video of them snowboarding.
We haven't searched for, or found any news on Despina Vandis' new song.
The social unrest in Greece is looking bad. Notice that the western press doesn't give it any coverage...but you can find stories and pictures in russian news.

We might update our front page later today. Or tomorrow.
I did want to say happy anniversary. But we haven't taken the time
to add any video links, or anything for an update.

No. We have been over on nbcolympics.com watching ,,of all things..
Olympic Curling! And Luge. We tried to watch figure skating, but NBC has
virtually 'polluted' the show with commercials. We are talking serious spam,,, 1 minute into the first routine: BAM! A commercial.
Hint: Watch the full broadcast. It is 3 and a half hours.

Now, we made this 'teaser' for Blest..but it really doesn't fit with
anything we are working on. So i give you the link in the blog -
Blest Teaser .
It is 16 seconds long, containing 7 recent pictures. With sound,,
we chopped Shar into a beginning and ending for the teaser.
The file is 1.2MB in size. It is a full 640x480 , so you can full screen it at 1024x768 and it looks fine. But we forgot to credit the
photographer . My apology . It is not on YouTube, because,well,,
we have better quality here. Our little secret...
mmm, I wish we could send it into the band, for them to use.
But we are really hoping they will have many new pictures from todays
festivities . Happy birthday, Anna !

We have often thought of creating a "today" page .
We would provide links to pages, such as the BBC
onthisday page,
Wikipedia, and what ever else we could find.
If you are an online news reader , it could be an interesting
way to start your day. After refreshing news pages and nothing new to read, we could hop over to cleaverb.net and catch 'today' ??

Alright, if you want to see some hot, hot! hot Blestyashchie photos,
check out XXL-online .

Now I will not say
'Blest are the most beautiful goddesses to grace planet earth..'
because obvious they wear plenty of make-up. Guess i'm old-fashioned;
because personality counts more than looks in our book.
Marina is bringing back the sexy mistique to the group.

Alright, mind out of the gutter now...
Hey today in history - March 1,1995 Yahoo! was incorporated.

And in addition to the 'proposed' "Today" page, we are looking into
creating a sign-language reference. About all we could do are the alphabets.

Our other choice is to create a 'useful software' page .
Where we can explain the 'why' of using certain programs.

Well, after a few years of experimenting, we are strongly going to
consider dumping MS Windows in favor of Linux. We dual-boot linux and windows. Yet we do almost everything in windows.
The Linux we use is light-weight; it boots faster, does everything
windows does. Except for a few old games we like to play.
So when our renewal notice for anti-virus comes up , we may just dump windows , and see if we can do without.

There is an 18 second clip on YouTube advertising a new single for
Despoina Vandi. See the video at - DESPINA VANDI - NEW SONG 2010 .

We just realized our D'Sound page lists Jony Sjo as the drummer.
I am not sure when we made that mistake... our bio information is correct. Correcting that now .

Watching the usa vs canada womens hockey game...

We have the latest hits by a few groups on the list.
The list for February 21,2010 on our Audio page
has 30 songs, 1 hour and 54 minutes in length.
We started out with the hope of making a 'light rock' list similar to the Jan.10,2008 playlist. Yet we had too many rock groups to ignore -
including Total and the new discovery; the Twiins.

The list includes our favorite songs from all the albums we are listening to the last few weeks. The last 15-16 songs we did our best to include some great vocal performances. Because these people can sing very well. then we had to include some Kristina in the group.
I just love some of her more creative songs. hope you enjoy the songs!

We have spent the last few days watching olympic curling, and hockey.
If you are interested; Vera Brezhneva's YouTube channel has uploaded
many new short clips. Anna Sedokova's channel also has added many new
short clips. And Anna Semenovich's YouTube channel also has many new clips.
We are not saying that these accounts are the actual women,
we are just saying they have tons of new material. Enjoy!

We noticed over the weekend that D'Sound's new album "Starts and Ends" is now on Amazon... but it is 'currently unavailable' .
Hopefully they will have mp3 or CDs up there before summer.

We have just updated the appearance of our search page . While we were messing around with it,
we searched Marina Berezhnaya, and we found a photo gallery from
Anastacia's birthday at MSN.ru .
Really good photos there,,,

And we also realized that we linked to 'hotcharts.ru' instead of
tophit.ru where the group uploaded the song. So we accidentally linked
to the 'recorded from the radio' version. sorry for that....

The Diskoteka Avaria in Vsegda Leto video we linked to yesterday is
actually a new video from late January '10 .

We just downloaded a collection of greatest hits of Tose Proeski.
It's not an official album. Someone just put together 16 great Tose
songs , and called it 'the best of tose proeski' .
Despite that, it is a nice collection.

Up next, we need to work on our cleaverb.org site pages and calendar.
Actually, we want to remove the org calendar, but we do not have anything else to link to. Yet. have a great day!

They are back. I guess we will never know what happened.
We had hoped they were fixing their site: the forum doesn't work.
And used to be you could click on a thumbnail picture in a news story,
and it would open a larger image. Now you get an error.
Blest.ru must have had a change in the web master dept ?
That would explain the lapses. They still have one of the 'best sites'
in our favorite artists.
Our top 25 could change soon. As it stands , Ani Lorak and Nelly Furtado are sitting in the theoretical 24th and 25th positions.
IF Yulia Kovalchuk released an album, she will be joining the top25.
We already love the songs she has released.
Zeljko is close to the top 25 also.
Vera Brezhneva and Anna Sedokova have good songs , but neither seems
to be interested in releasing album in the near future.
Alena Vinnitskaya has some excellent albums, and she is definitely
one of our top25, if only she had a new album out.

We also have started a new section for Tribute pages. That is where we are placing the 'other' artists' . For the year, we hope to add page
for DaBuzz, and possibly Mr Credo, Sheryl Crow, Spice Girls,
the Presets, Tanya Bulanova, etc.

We hope to update our front page either tonight or saturday.
Need to get rid of that text. Yeah, we goofed. I do not think anyone,
nobody saw it. But just in case, we thought best to leave the notice
up for 24 hours minimum. We do not want to mention what was said,
we mis-translated an article . Thought something was going to happen.
It was a negative statement. And we forgot the negative part...

We have updated the links to music videos in 20 of our
top 25 artists. It seems that UMG is deleting many videos from "official" artists pages... Nelly Furtado had every video removed.
It brings up the question in my mind, are we sharing creative, artists
material, or are just plain exploiting them ? You decide.
...........
The new Blest song that leaked is worth a listen. You can find pages
of links to mp3s of the song. Simply go to google, or bing, yahoo! ,
type in " blestyaschie - shar " without the quotes .. hit search.

I can't say how the song would be accepted in Russian mainstream music..
but the freshness of Marina's voice is exciting!
And we do not promote 'illegal' activity ,like stealing songs and uploading them. did it really happen that way ? i don't know.

Blest.ru is no longer found. We have been having trouble with many
russian websites this week. apparently an undersea cable was damaged in the middle east, and possibly causes some problems.
I just checked the "whois" data, and Blest.ru , the domain name expired on February 8, 2010. Possibly they could be switching to
the new cyrillic .рф or even .su . But we think they just let it lapse. OOPS! Or maybe they intentionally let it go down to update
graphics, seeing they have a new member ?

PS. Their server is in the US, so i should not have any problems with
'undersea cables' any where in the world...
Now they will probably have to wait 3 days for the DNS to update to
their name, whether they changed hosts or not. I will check their Facebook page to see if they have been on today.