Harve

The exceedingly rare Zanmatory-Skall silver medal swap 😭 Loved the winner but must admit I didn't expect it to do quite that well - congrats!!!

A rare occasion of giving my 18 to a song I already know!

Cody when he's about to finish 7-13th.

I am not sure about how these airlines are getting away with ditching safety protocols for style. We must have some lax civil aviation authorities!!

The Equestria flight experience tho

Hoping that Skall's image is indeed of an airship and not of a plane.

Omg Terra Avium throwback. Pretty sure that made my personal chart in like 2009 when it was already very retro. What's scary is that is now closer to the song's 1993 release than it is to today.

I work at Geneva Airport and since 2021 British people can easily end up queuing 1.5 hours going through passport control on landing the early afternoon. This routinely causes people to miss onward transport. It can be the same at Zurich. Split-second mild inconvenience? I can go through European gates and I've never queued more than 5 minutes.

(sorry for spoiling if you were still planning to watch a show that's two decades old)

The manifest of Oceanic Flight 815 have been through 6 seasons of TV sci-fi drama and its survivors have escaped their tropical island TWICE in the time that we've been waiting for this contest to start.

Skall have sent over a backup artist on their fastest airship.

I'd love to know the following: Total number of votes cast per entry, by country i.e. just the numerical breakdown of the result Total number of unique voters per entry Number of times a voter votes for a particular entry on average, which is just a function of the two values above When there is a surge of votes and how that differs by entry (when lines open/once song is performed/once all songs are performed and they play the recaps). Transparency would help!

No if you disagree with my love for passion fruit then that does not make you far right but there is obviously a context here. Some people just don't care about politics, or do care about politics but don't want it in Eurovision. Those two groups are probably the backbone of the entire contest. But if you are encouraged to vote for a country because you don't like that people are upset about the genocide that said country is carrying out then that is a political reaction. It's perfectly plausible that the song itself has legitimate fans (I loved Israel's 2021 entry! Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to vote for it today for explicitly political motivations), but other posts have explained why this doesn't explain its high score.

That top 3 sure is baller.

Getting maximum points is not necesssarily indicative of public opinion either. It's just that it's very easy for an entry like Israel's to be a lightningrod for the right wing bloc who have no reason to vote for any other entry, particularly if they are not actually interested in the contest as you admit, when the anti-Israel bloc - as well as those not interested in the political dimension which obviously is a huge number of people too - has their voting power split 25 (or 36) ways amongst everybody else. In a non-political sense getting maximum points doesn't suggest consensus - it's the reverse of the UK or Switzerland getting 0, which just means that they were few people's favourite when I doubt they were the most hated songs of many despite having the worst score. It would only explain majority opinion if there were two entries rather than 26, but with 26 you benefit from polarisation. If Israel had won it wouldn't have been a validation of public opinion regarding the song or the Palestinian genocide for that matter. It just confirms that there is a right wing voting bloc, which we already know. The existence of this bloc makes total sense when Israel sees the contest as a crucial tool to soften its image to the world and has invested so much into it/chosen blatent propaganda entries for the last two years.

Yeah, I do think that most of their televote is a quite an organic far right wing vote though, which exists in every country. Organic in the sense that they're not bought SIM cards but could still of course be for reasons entirely unrelated to the song. I don't think that part necessarily needs to be formally coerced by Israel and is just a consequence of their wider propaganda, although if there is an element of that for any single country's votes then I'd be interested in the investigation. I don't think there is a clean solution other than at a geopolitical level with a consensus established that Israel is a genocidal state and for the appropriate sanctions to follow on from that. But obviously that's bigger than this contest and we are nowhere near that. I do wonder what would happen if the contest was hosted in a country that formally recognises Palestine, which notably Sweden does.

I mean is this not the issue. Anyway enough about that fiasco from me. - Really surprised that Estonia did so well with the public - and ok with the jury - when San Marino/Iceland did terribly. I really thought they'd appeal similarly and was gutted for the latter in particular! - I see Italy as having a massively variable entry quality (I guess they do like to go for lots of different genres which is nice, but some are very much not appealing to me) but this does matter as they seem to do well every year. - Luxembourg jury flop oops, I thought it was an underdog for a really good jury score. - Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Portugal seem to have the strongest diaspora effect but I don't think their scores can be attributed entirely to that, nor can diasporas be relied on (= Switzerland has a huge Portuguese population especially in the French-speaking part but gave Portugal nothing).

In terms of the Israel near-miss and destroying the contest forever: We were calcing live as you can work out how many votes are left to be dished out from the 2204 total point televote pool. So it got very scary when: - Estonia got a huge televote score but failed to overtake Israel. This then made it harder for everybody else to overtake. - Sweden's televote lowkey flopped but still took enough points out the pool to make it difficult for other nations to get a good enough score. 367 points up for grabs for the top 5 jury songs at that point - an Austria vs. Israel split screen felt locked in at that point. - Then Italy got an OK televote score, leaving just 228 points for the top 3 nations. If they were split broadly evenly between Austria, France and Switzerland then that's a disaster. Nothing against the entries, but for this purpose it was a relief that France only got 50 and Switzerland got 0, leaving Austria with more than enough to win. If we were to assume that Israel has a huge televote locked in then this is how an Israel win happens - there would be a bunched-up scoreboard, particularly with the jury vote, with the right side of the scoreboard still getting a respectable score. The bottom half got 466 jury points vs. 256 last year. But there's no guarantee that Israel would flop in the jury vote in the future and there's no point gaming these scenarios every year. Moral considerations for Eurovision - and more fundamentally in geopolitics - have been proven to be irrelevant but purely in the interests of self-preservation for the contest it's best for Israel to be gone. Finally, Azerbaijan's jury votes look suss - it's not necessarily the 12 to Israel, it's also that all the other entries considered favourites (Austria, Sweden, France) were completely snubbed which nobody else did.

Not my ranking but my predictions Jury 1. Austria 2. Netherlands 3. Sweden 4. France 5. Switzerland 6. Finland 7. Albania 8. Luxembourg 9. Greece 10. Latvia 11. Poland 12. Norway 13. Italy 14. Ukraine 15. Lithuania 16. Portugal 17. Israel 18. Denmark 19. Malta 20. Armenia 21. UK 22. Spain 23. Estonia 24. Iceland 25. San Marino 26. Germany Public 1. Sweden 2. Austria 3. Finland 4. Israel 5. Albania 6. San Marino 7. Iceland 8. France 9. Netherlands 10. Switzerland 11. Latvia 12. Germany 13. Estonia 14. Denmark 15. Ukraine 16. Armenia 17. Greece 18. Lithuania 19. Luxembourg 20. Poland 21. Portugal 22. Malta 23. Norway 24. Spain 25. Italy 26. UK Who knows what that could make it overall.

We have arrived a little late due to travelling by airship as aeroplanes are BANNED here due to Skall's efforts in fighting climate change.

Most certain of NQ'ing to least certain: Georgia Serbia Montenegro Czechia Lithuania Malta Latvia Ireland Armenia Denmark Greece Luxembourg Australia Israel Finland Austria I feel like only the top 3-4 are very safe though!

Won't give money to ESC while a certain country is competing but I would have voted for Latvia as I gather they're in danger.

What a way to close!

The former yugoslav entries have all been so disappointing this year.

The studio version is superior to the live performance unfortunately.