Eurovision!

Yes, I will next write about Eurovision, which, as an American, I think is just super-fantastic-trashy-awesome, because the closest thing we have to it is the talent competition of the Miss America pageant, and that's full of boring future local news anchors performing opera, piano, and the occasional violin piece with general technical precision, but no soul, which, come to think of it, is not very Eurovision. But I will expound upon all this later.

Should you like your music a little less fizzy, today is Duke Ellington's 105th birthday. So take a walk across the bridge into Adams Morgan or by the school in Georgetown that have his name, and say hello, should you happen to be in the general vicinity.

"Roses Smell Like Poo-poo-poo-poo"

Hark! My name has been known to pop up in pop tunes (choons) from time to time. I like this new offering, and I find two others consistently listenable:

1. "Pretty In Pink": Ever read London Fields? Caroline here is like Nicola Six, except nice and not all hell-bent on being murdered. Top song.

2. "Caroline": As one might notice with the aforementioned "Roses", most times when you stick a Caroline in, she's a right bitch. In this particular ditty, Caroline is the one getting repeatedly shafted. It's quite refreshing, actually, and highly mimetic in my neck of the woods.

And that's about it, really.

FACT: "Sweet Caroline" is just an absolute sonic abomination that should have been aborted in the recording studio, it is that horrid and nightmarish.

Two-Hundred-Fifty-Thousand Dollars? And It's Not Even Leather?

NotoriousRRZ and I agree that The Apprentice, great though it is with its current zeitgeist, really should have aired in the late 1980s, when its inherent absurdity could have been magnified tenfold. You wouldn't even have to change a thing with the show, just skew for contestants born in 1959 rather than 1974 and have that Taj concert be by, oh, I don't know, T'Pau, or whatever. I specifically think it should have been scheduled for the Fall 1987 season as the lead-in for St. Elsewhere, with its finale right before the stock market crash. That? Would have been awesome. No whammies!

Way Back Round the Way

BBC Radio 2 is running an 88-91 day today. What did I listen to between 1988-1991? Appalling awful stuff. And what did I watch on television? Even worse. See, in terms of American television, we had one channel: AFN. There is a reason why I've seen every episode of Alf, MacGyver, and the first seasons of Blossom and Full House and the bulk of the late '80s/early '90s storylines on Guiding Light: they were licensed for broadcast to AFN. And that was about it. So, at least in my family, we also watched a bunch of German television, which, coincidentally, consisted of a lot of dubbed Alf episodes.

Anyway, when the hell did AFN get all Freeview-stylee n' shit? Good lord. What happened to one channel being programmed with: a shitty spaghetti western, followed by a delayed Good Morning America, General Hospital, Guiding Light, Oprah, news, this gawd-awful boring piece of crap called Gasthaus where somebody dull from USAEUR was interviewed for an interminable ten minutes from 7:50-8:00 PM CET, lame sitcom, lame drama, and Star Trek? Damn.

*Resurfaces*

I've got quite a few tidbits from the past few weeks while incommunicado.

In the meantime, I found this site quite fascinating. It's a woman's travelogue as she travels on motorcycle through the areas of Ukraine and Belarus affected by the Chernobyl meltdown.

In Europe, Chernobyl is still a primary charity concern; here, though, it seems to have fallen off our conscience's radar. Maybe it could be something as transparent as Chernobyl sharing the same anniversary month as Three Mile Island, and we've fastened memory to the anglophonic story because it's easier to grasp the geography and demographics of western Pennsylvania than Soviet eastern Europe. Or perhaps we would just rather to suppress the fact that something on the magnitude of Chernobyl ever happened in the first place.