They were robbed.

One of the remarkable things of my 8 years here in Europe is how I have become enthralled in the competitions that Americans don’t get to see. For example in 2012, the S.O. and I got deeply into the EURO 2012 football ( soccer) tournament. Same with 2016 – and of course, we O.D.’ed on the two World Cups that took place while we have been here.

In other venue’s, both the S.O. and I have become serious fans of the singing competitions on our British satellite network: Britain’s got Talent and Stricly Come Dancing, which is a much better version it’s poor American cousin Dancing with the Stars.

But in all these years, we never followed Eurovision very closely. For those Americans who choose to remain clueless about the rest of the world, Eurovision is an annual international song competition, with participants representing primarily European countries. Each participating country submits an original song to be performed on live television and radio, then casts votes for the other countries’ songs to determine the winner. At least 50 countries are eligible to compete as of 2018, and since 2015, Australia has been allowed as a guest entrant.

This year we followed the Eurovision contest, primarily because it was held in Israel, and I was convinced it would be touch and go if they would go through with it, in light of the incredibly boneheaded decisions by Hamas to launch scores of rockets at Israel the week before. But in an ironic twist, Israel and Hamas declared a cease fire in time for the contest to proceed.

35 teams were in the semi finals, and it slimmed down to 26 for the finals.
The running order is decided to ensure each act has the opportunity to stand out among the crowd. To come to a decision, the producers look at the genre of music, whether a song is performed by a solo singer or group, the use of props, the tempo of the song and various other aspects of each act.

With the possible exception of Iceland’s entry, which I absolutely hated, I thought all of the acts were really good. But the one that jumped out for me was Norway’s. Their entry, Spirit in the Sky was awesome.

Norway got the greatest number of public votes, but under the complicated Eurovision voting scheme, only got 57 from the jury voting. That dropped them to fifth as the voting went on.

Which is truly an injustice.

As an aside, Albania did not do really well, but their singer is really hot.