EuroVision 2019

Last night, for the first time, I won the family competition — picking seven and summing point totals.

Observations:

1. UK always seems to do terribly (at least since 2003, when they got precisely zero points). I thought the UK act a very nice song, but it came dead last. My theory is that people resent speaking and singing in English and take it out on the UK.
2. Half of the points are assigned by “expert” jury, half by public voting. This year there was a clear “populist”/nativist/folkist deviation from the experts. The act of the non-EU European country of Norway, with a Sami theme and reindeer-herding “joik,” received the most public points, 291, versus only 47 expert-jury points. Performing below expectations were both the more politically correct, “diversity” type acts (France, Germany), and the manufactured slick “globalist” pop numbers, like Sweden’s, which, in years past probably would have won. Italy sang in Italian and took second place. Spain sang in Spanish yet scored very poorly perhaps because of its abstract atomistic cubic setting and a humanoid robot: