I love the Eurovison Song Contest. For a few hours every year, the countries of the EBU gather and entertain us with songs good and bad.
I would love to go to a final. The chances of th UK winning are virtually zero these days, and travel to foreign countries is expensive and not fun on your own. But who knows…
The interval can be a highlight. No-one who saw it will ever forget Riverdance. However, this is one of my favourites.
It is something that makes me well up every time I watch it. I know the UK contribution is rubbish, but the one from Hamburg is great, as is the man on the rock.
Best is Dublin. It’s great when the camera lifts up and there are all those people, even in the windows.
And it’s a real party spirit at the end, with all the audience joining it. Brilliant.
I have deliberately stopped writing about politics and news, because it is too depressing, but I wanted to say a few words about the interview with Prince Andrew on BBC last Saturday.
Andrew is the Queen’s second son and third child, and has been involved with convicted and now dead financier Jeffrey Epstein. The interview was to clear the air about the various sexual and other allegations against the partying prince, set the record straight etc I assume.
But this article from GQ magazine says virtually all of it in a much better way than I possibly could, and I commend it for your attention.
I love a good science fiction film, but there are things that always puzzle me. Here are a couple.
Why do doors on spacecraft nearly always open automatically? Are crewmen so lazy they cannot open a door?
Yes, I know it’s a lift really, but pictures of people walking through doors are not that interesting
The spacecraft we have had so far in realy have had a problem – weight. Every gram of excess weight needs more fuel. Most of the Saturn V rocket was designed to lift, well, itself. The payload was minute. Surely, excess weight for door opening motors would be avoided at all costs.
And have you noticed, when people want locked doors to open they shoot them with ray guns? And when they want them to lock, they shoot them with ray guns.
And what about transporters? They are amazing things. They are machines that take every molecule of an animate or inanimate object and transfer them instantly to another place where they are reassembled perfectly (except when the plot demands they are not working properly) without mixing them up.
The destination doesn’t even have to be another transporter machine. People just appear anyway (or disappear) from thin air. In fact, you can transport from one place without a transporter to another without a transporter. That’s a miracle.
And they must be so deadly accurate, to within the tiniest fraction of an atom. If a person is being transported onto a surface and is just a little bit too low, their molecules will meld with the molecules of the floor and they will be stuck. Too high above the surface and they will fall the last distance and possibly be hurt.
