YOUR 2005 Eurovision Champion...

...is Helena from Greece, for "My Number One." Congratulations to the winner, although it must be remembered that everyone's a winner at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Information of any kind about the Eurovision contest can be pretty difficult to come by if, like me, you happen to live in North America. This is too bad, 'cause I absolutely love the idea - one of the nifty things about Europe is all the weird little competitions they've invented for all the states to participate in (Eurovision, all those goofy soccer tournaments, etc.) (This is one area where the U.S. is embarrassingly backward. We simply don't have an analogue for these kinds of things. Sure, you've got your Superbowls and World Series and so forth, but that's not truly geographically representative; I always wondered what football team you're supposed to root for if you live in Wyoming, or South Dakota, or Alabama. And anyway, most sports bore me to tears - where's the AmeriVision Song Contest? And, no, American Idol does not cut the mustard...). I imagine that, as the world becomes more economically integrated, it will become culturally moreso as well, and finding out about the Eurovision contest will be no more difficult than finding out about the World Cup. But I'm not interested in waiting maybe 15 years for this, I want to be able to tape Eurovision 2006 and I want to know what to set my VCR for now. Europe used to simply have religious wars, ideological conflicts, contests for territory and natural resources or rivalries between petty tyrants or statesmen; now they settle their differences through the understated majesty of three-minute, disposable pop songs. This is one reason why, as the upper left-hand corner of your screen will tell you, we love the modern world.


UPDATE: Holy crap. Send money now.