Welcome – Bienvenu – Wilkommen – Bienvenido – Valkommen to Eurovision week!
This year the Euro-powers that be have helpfully put all of the participants’ preview videos on YouTube, or EuroTube as we are now calling it.
We have (painfully) watched all of the preview videos and (mostly) scientifically scored them to find you the best – and the worst – of Eurovision 2009.
But how do you score such diverse fare? We’ve taken inspiration from the BBC Culture Show piece Neil Hannon (of Divine Comedy, Father Ted and Tomorrows World theme fame) did a while back that stated his four golden rules of Eurovision.
(He also wrote a song that followed all these rules although that sadly has yet to be the official Irish entry.)
1. Have as many key changes as possible
Example: Bucks Fizz’s 1981 winning song “Making your mind up”
2. Use Celtic Mystic Chords that “don’t really know what they want to be”
A near perfect example of this is the 1996 winner for Ireland (who else?) Eimear Quinn – “The Voice”
3. A Meaningless Lyric Offends No-one
4. Rolling snare drums
Both rules are effortlessly embodied by 1965 winner France Gall – Poupée de cire, poupée de son
Bringing these rules up to date we’ve added three more:
5. Stage Ghey – essentially the ‘gheyer’ the song is, the better it does.
Azerbaijan’s entry in 2008 really can’t get much more Ghey – it’s a classic tale of good ghey angel verses evil ghey demon. How many times have we heard that story?
6. Madness!!! A rule oft overlooked by other marking schemes, the pure madness of some Eurovision entries just wins it for them.
The 2007 Ukrane entry Verka Serduchka – a kind of disco space nazi granny with silver hitler youth backing dancers – has ‘Stage Ghey’ and ‘Madness’ in abundance. Not a winner, sadly, as they were beaten by Jimmie Krankie lookalike Marija Šerifovic and her lesbian backing singers.
Another strong entry in the ‘Madness’ category from the same year was France’s “The Fatal Picards” with a Richard O’Brien lookalike with a cat stapled to his shoulder that he sings to.
7. Aluma-rock is a recent addition, after the surprise victory by Lordi in 2006 several countries have now taken on ‘rock’ and ‘metal’ but in a light way, hence Aluma-rock.
More an example of ‘proper metal’ but I can’t resist a video of 2006 Finnish winners Lordi and their ‘Hard Rock
Hallelujah’
Coming up in the next post – our top 5 (ok, 6) tips for Eurovision 2009!
I really wish this was Sweden’s official Eurovision entry but its not. Cracking tune all the same – would go down well with the EV crowd I’m sure. Though if I were being critical it could do with a key change…
Eurovision is soon! I go a bit Eurovision-crazy nearer the time and will soon be posting up B & my own special Eurovision Judging critera, scores for all Euvrovision 2009 participants and our own tips for the top!
Until then, listen to Agnes and check out the Eurovision entries on YouTube…
If you’ve ever had to scale an image down for the web – or especially to make an icon – you might have noticed that the image actually gets a bit blurrier sometimes. This is surprising! We all know when you scale images up they get blurrier, but you would think when you scale down they’d get sharper, right? Well, no. Scaling down means taking a mathematical average between neighboring pixels and this will make fine details get softer as the colors of the background ‘bleed’ into them.
To help show this I’ve made up some example images.
Continue reading why images get blurry when they get smaller…
Going for a walk yesterday was obvious a good move; not only was it a warm and sunny day but I also had a bit of a brainwave for the UI design of the Snooker Scorer. The problem I had was that I wanted to add some extra buttons in what was already a complex UI. I’m going to add some stat tracking so that users can see the pot and safety success rate – but right now there is only one button to swap players at the end of a break. I need to let users choose between three options; a safety (no pot attempted), a missed short pot and a missed long pot.
My previous prototype had some extra button squeezed in. This wasn’t great, because it made the space for all the other ‘pot ball’ buttons smaller, and also I just couldn’t work out how to make an icon for ‘safety’ or ‘missed long pot’.
My brainwave was to not put new buttons in. Instead I’ll make an overlay appear when the ‘swap players’ button is pressed and held down. The user can then drag up the screen to choose a short/long pot miss. If the user just presses down and releases their finger they will get a ‘safety’ which is roughly the same behavior as before. I think this will feel quite good in practice and also can be done without looking at the screen too much.
After hearing about Dizzee Rascal’s appearance on Newsnight and hearing his new track, I just had to combine the two. With apologies to all involved, I give you “BonkersNight featuring J-Pax”!
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So my ‘snooker score’ app has been out for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been really pleased with it so far; I’ve had some great feedback from people and there are quite a few more things to do with it than I had originally thought.
In testing with Apple at the moment is a 1.1 update that will add
- Undo (which I was planning to add anyway but was mentioned by a Finnish reviewer)
- A bug fix – if the last ‘red and color’ you potted was a yellow, this would incorrectly have been considered as the last yellow. Now it will ask you to pot the yellow again, which is correct (pointed out by Ruud – many thanks!)
- Remove Red Ball – a new action on the menu, you can take a red ball off the table without affecting the score. Ruud pointed out that you sometimes need to do this in Snooker, e.g. if you pot two balls in a single turn that’s not a foul, but you’ll only get 1 point for it. Also you could foul by potting a color and a red. In that case the color would be respotted (and the opponent would get points) but the red would not.
- More info – the single line of information now changes every 2 seconds to show more information, including Current Break, Score Difference, Maximum Break, Points Remaining, Red Balls Remaining.
All in all this is a good next version – I’m very happy that I managed to get undo and an updating info line in so easily (the NSTimer class being easier to use than I’d expected).
Continue reading Snooker Score – update and future thoughts…
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