{"id":1186,"date":"2008-05-21T16:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T16:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/larelle.wordpress.com\/2008\/05\/21\/eurovision-1st-semi-final"},"modified":"2008-05-21T16:14:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T16:14:00","slug":"eurovision-1st-semi-final","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/?p=1186","title":{"rendered":"Eurovision 1st Semi-Final."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well there wasn&#8217;t as many &#8220;gems&#8221; as I was hoping for. Of course there was Dustin from Ireland. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll spoil it for anyone who hasn&#8217;t seen the semi yet by telling you he didn&#8217;t get through \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n<p>Estonia was a stand-out. They were singing a song called &#8220;Leto Svet&#8221;, which by the English translations we were getting on the TV screen was all about having too much food and enjoying the summer light.<br \/>\n[youtube=http:\/\/youtu.be\/2r2LrMaAquE]<\/p>\n<p>Another stand-out was Bosnia and Herzegovina with a song called Pokusaj by a guy called Laka. Really WEIRD presentation of the song, but the song itself was catchy. I watched a clip of it in English, but it wasn&#8217;t as catchy as it was in the native tongue.<br \/>\n[youtube=http:\/\/youtu.be\/FHlKhhNLo4w]<\/p>\n<p>Belgium&#8217;s was a bit funny. The song was done in a &#8220;non-language&#8221; (IE: gibberish), but it was sort of catchy.<br \/>\n[youtube=http:\/\/youtu.be\/X5F8ZNMCRB4]<\/p>\n<p>Azerbaijan &#8211; I think they thought they were Linkin Park or something. Not my cup of tea. The presenter kept saying one of the guys singing looked like a TV presenter here in the UK, Jonathan Ross. I LOVE the guys window-shattering falsetto at the start of the number though. The presenter last night said something like &#8220;If you have pets around at the moment, you might want to watch out&#8221;. Amazingly &#8211; they got through to the final!<br \/>\n[youtube=http:\/\/youtu.be\/eo0VrY5C-ow]<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what was going on with the Finnish entry. I think they were trying to recapture the win they had in 2006 with Lordi. Lordi were a heavy metal act in full masked costumes. They did a song called &#8220;Hard Rock Hallelujah&#8221; and it was brilliant. This year Finland went for heavy metal again, without make-up and singing in their native tongue. It didn&#8217;t really work.<\/p>\n<p>Russia&#8217;s song was awful. The guy looked like one of our &#8220;pop idol&#8221; serial wannabe&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Darius_Danesh\">Darius Danesh<\/a>. They got in the final, but only (I think) from the help of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Evgeny_Plushenko\">Evgeni Plushenko<\/a> skating around the stage!<\/p>\n<p \/>That&#8217;s it for now. More gems in the days to come I&#8217;m sure. Including the Spanish, Croatian and Latvian entries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well there wasn&#8217;t as many &#8220;gems&#8221; as I was hoping for. Of course there was Dustin from Ireland. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll spoil it for anyone who hasn&#8217;t seen the semi yet by telling you he didn&#8217;t get through \ud83d\ude41 Estonia was a stand-out. They were singing a song called &#8220;Leto Svet&#8221;, which by the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/?p=1186\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Eurovision 1st Semi-Final.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[91,201,337],"class_list":["post-1186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-culture","tag-music","tag-video"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}