Running from the end of Dusseldorf 2011 with the victory of ‘Running Scared’ to the start of Baku 2012, ‘Eurovision: Beyond the Sequins’ looks in-depth at Europe’s favourite TV Show, as well as following Ewan Spence’s travels across Europe to visit the National Finals of Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as the preview parties across the continent.

Ewan Spence looks beyond the sequins, pyrotechnics and key changes to explore what Eurovision really means, from the finer details of the contest to the myth of political voting. This book examines whether the best song ever wins, the media perception of the contest and the ability of this mad, wonderful institution to represent Europe and the people of the continent

Eurovision is more than three hours on a Saturday night in May. It’s something that lives and breathes throughout the year. But what happens between the end of one contest and the start of the next? In those fifty weeks before rehearsals start once more, the Song Contest doesn’t stop. It doesn’t die. It’s still a huge sprawling exploration of culture, music, people, and politics.

The Guardian have published my latest book through their Guardian Shorts brand. If you head over to Amazon, you’ll be able to pick up your Kindle copy (Amazon US also carries the book, and iBooks will have it up shortly as well).

I’d love to hear your comments on the book – there’s about one week to the Eurovision Final (May 26th), so there’s not a huge amount of time to promote the book while the Contest is still in the public conscious, so feel free to tweet, message, or write up a post on the book. And if you’d like to review it, get in touch!

First review is up on Amazon as well:

If you want to jumpstart your ESC week with something more than just the usual Abba revival shows, buy this.

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the very few true European experiences and tools like twitter and facebook have put it on a whole new level. In my childhood I learned to count in english and french through it, today a week ahead of the big night I am looking forward to watching the event online and the hashtag for #esc at the same time.

Although coming from a citizen of the UK ;) Ewan’s book provides a very European look at this event and how it plays out over the year. Given that most people know all the basics of the event, there is no need to introduce it here except for those typical questions of the political voting. I especially like the insights into the different countries how they chose their entries – I never realized f.e. how big the festival in sweden is.

There is a lot of love involved for the ESC and the book is set up in nice little chunks, making it a perfect “read a chapter a day to prepare” for the final. Now if you excuse me, I need to find out where to watch the semifinals …

It’s still on Amazon, obviously.

Today, it all seems too late. The iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr, but the feeling isn’t mutual. Flickr isn’t even among the top 50 free photography apps in iTunes. It’s just below an Instagram clone in 64th place. By way of comparison, an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your photos is 23rd. If you can’t beat laser cat, you probably deserve to die.

And even more head meets desk moments from Gizmodo.

The Guardian have published my latest book through their Guardian Shorts brand. If you head over to Amazon, you’ll be able to pick up your Kindle copy (Amazon US also carries the book, and iBooks will have it up shortly as well).

Eurovision: Beyond the Sequins.

Ewan Spence looks beyond the sequins, pyrotechnics and key changes to explore what Eurovision really means, from the finer details of the contest to the myth of political voting. This book examines whether the best song ever wins, the media perception of the contest and the ability of this mad, wonderful institution to represent Europe and the people of the continent.

Eurovision is more than three hours on a Saturday night in May. It’s something that lives and breathes throughout the year. But what happens between the end of one contest and the start of the next? In those fifty weeks before rehearsals start once more, the Song Contest doesn’t stop. It doesn’t die. It’s still a huge sprawling exploration of culture, music, people, and politics.

I’d love to hear your comments on the book – there’s about one week to the Eurovision Final (May 26th), so there’s not a huge amount of time to promote the book while the Contest is still in the public conscious, so feel free to tweet, message, or write up a post on the book. And if you’d like to review it, get in touch!

 Go Hansen! Go you silver-legged son of a bitch! There he was! Getting ready to pull it out and show the odds-on favorites what he was made of! Except he didn’t. Hell, he didn’t even show. It turned out he was made out of lose. Metaphors. They are cruel.

Giz.

Last night, after several months of rumors and speculation, Samsung finally announced their 2012 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III. It’s a device that I’ve been telling everyone to wait for, telling everyone that it’s going to be the best Android handset to come out this year, telling everyone that buying any other smartphone would be a huge mistake. Now that the Galaxy S III is official, I have to admit that I was wrong, and I’m deeply sorry.

Stefan Constantinescu.

If you’d like to see this film as much as I do, turn to 68.

If you’d rather die, turn to 14.

But one of Jim’s posts always stuck with me, and with all the tweets popping up today (May 1st), I wanted to revisit that post. One hunt through backups and archives later, and it gets a re-post here:

Today is the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death at Imola. So what has happened in Formula 1? Are the cars safer, slower, is the driving cleaner? Yes, No and definitely not – Michael’s outrageous punting off of JPM at Imola is graphic evidence of how low F1 driver standards have sunk in the past decade.

I watched both accidents at Imola ten years ago (I also watched Berger’s accident at Tamburello a few years previously), Ayrton’s didn’t affect me. Maybe I was still in shock, but I never liked the guy. Sure he was exquisitely fast, but his general attitude to racing – if in doubt punt your rivals off – was abhorrent to me, imagine your grief if Michael was killed today? Rightly or wrongly that’s  pretty much how I felt about Ayrton.

Roland Ratzenberger was a different matter; he was one of the good guys. I’d seen him race at Le Mans a few times, and he was no muppet paying for a seat. I believe he was Toyota’s first non-Japanese works driver, which in those days said a lot, even if Toyota’s current approach to employing drivers is somewhat surreal. Just wanting Schumi lite never mind being willing to pay him millions is rather odd…

Watching a driver (or any human being) being given heart massage  on live television is not an everyday sight, and it’s not one I want to see again. But that’s what I saw after Roland’s accident and it was very moving and disturbing. Later in 1994 I went to Le Mans and one of the SARD Toyotas had four drivers’ names painted next to the door, but only three drivers at the circuit; Eddie Irvine, Jeff Krosnoff and Mauro Martini. This is the car that Roland was supposed to have been driving.

90 minutes from the end of the race it was leading, when it slowed and stopped just past me on the pit straight with a broken gear linkage. Krosnoff got out of the car, went around the back and manually selected third gear. He then set off on a slow lap of the 9 mile circuit before pitting for the linkage to be replaced. The car lost 13 minutes and dropped back to third place, 15 seconds behind the second placed car. Irvine cut this lead at a rate of three seconds per lap, and I’ve never seen so many people willing a car to go faster. Irvine took second place on the penultimate lap, but the lead car was a lap ahead, and “Roland’s” team had to settle for second place.

Roland, Ayrton, rest in peace.

What could possibly go wrong?

I believe I have found a knock-down argument for marriage equality: there is no decent verb for “civil partnership”. #Pedants4EqualMarriage

Tom Morris

XKCD.

When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product. That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.

The problem is you can only pull that trick once before the networks see the customer feedback. 24 months later, all those customers looking to buy another smartphone on contract… didn’t buy a Nokia.

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Download audio file (tpn_rock_friday_20120406_223.mp3)
MP3 File – Show Notes – RSS Feed

With Blondfire, Emma Louise, Cosmo Jarvis, Boy, and Gemma Ray.

Alongside the articles from myself, a core writing team of three others, and a number of regular contributors, it’s also the home of my Unofficial Eurovision Song Contest Podcast. There’s enough Eurovision news throughout the year for a weekly news podcast, but as the Contest gets ever neared (May 26th) and the countries all declare their songs for Europe, the ESC Insight team sit down to judge every single song on the podcast, in a series of “Juke Box Jury” shows.

A simple format (we listen to each song, five per episode) and rate them Hit, Miss, or Maybe. After some lively discussion. Two episodes have already been posted, with the rest to follow one a week each Friday till Eurovision starts.

Download audio file (escinsight_20120330_141_JBJ2012_2.mp3)
Episode 1:  Albania, Finland, Moldova, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

Download audio file (escinsight_20120323_139_JBJ2012_1.mp3)
Episode 2: Macedonia, Hungary, Latvia, Iceland, and Slovenia.

Don’t miss an episode of this year’s Juke Box Jury (or any of The Unofficial Eurovision Podcast episodes), subscribe to the RSS feed dedicated to the podcasts. iTunes users can find us in the iTunes Store and get the show automatically downloaded to your computer.

Well, after being seen 75 minutes late for my appointment, the news is mixed. I don’t yet have a treatment plan as I need a further test (PET scan, some kind of radioactive thing, but I won’t get superpowers). There’s no further visible tumour at the initial site, and my lungs are clear, but my lymph nodes are enlarged which indicates a “not likely but possible” chance the cancer has already spread. This test will ascertain that, so in about a month I should know whether I’m having chemoradiation (mostly radiotherapy with a low dose of chemo thrown in) or systemic chemotherapy with a bit of radiotherapy (that’s the full-on serious one where I’d lose my hair and get really sick). Sigh.

From Vikki, via Facebook. Any comments on big blue rather than here, please?

So it turns out the birth of your first child is perhaps the most emotionally charged experience you’ll ever have. I even put down the new Angry Birds game for 10 minutes so I could concentrate fully, and that’s set in space.

Download audio file (tpn_rock_friday_20120323_220.mp3)
MP3 File – Show Notes – RSS Feed 

The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently and nothing can be done, and no move made, until “a nice cup of tea” is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not so tea-conscious. World-peace conferences would run more smoothly if “a nice cup of tea”, or indeed, a samovar were available at the proper time.

Well, the internet says it is her, and even if it’s not, it rings true.

Is someone trying to tell us something?

From the moment Kermit came out, there were really two people onstage. Steve played around with this a bit. Since he was speaking before an audience of mostly puppeteers, Steve started off by saying that he wasn’t going to split himself and pretend that Kermit was actually here. Kermit lowered his head in sadness at this news, which got a big laugh. Steve then referred to Kermit as being a puppet rather than an actual person; Kermit just stared at Steve with that irritated “squishy face” look that gets me every time. Kermit also introduced Steve as his puppet, which drew a big laugh from the audience. So, despite a common understanding of the art and skill of puppetry, Kermit was a real live person for everyone in the room, which is a tremendous testament to the “consciousness” of the character that Steve spoke about earlier.

Steve Whitmire and Kermit the frog (via Muppet Mindset).

She’s going for an MRI and CT scan this afternoon, and should hear next Thursday what her treatment plan will be. We’ve tried to get in touch with family before posting this, but we really need to share this and be able to talk about it online. If you need to reach out to either of us, you know where to find us.

As for the hashtag, #BlameVikkisCancer, well I blame Drew’s Cancer for that. And we’re going to send this back just as Drew did.

Seesmic Lays Off Half Its Staff as It Pivots Back to Social Cross-Posting, All Things D.