Eurovision 2016 Winner!

The most bombastic and overly produced Eurovision shows I've ever seen - and yes, I did watch the whole thing - was just not as much fun as it should have been.  Everything was so over the top (but that's not always bad thing given that I personally give bonus points for "cheese") yet I just felt stunned by the strobe lights, smoke, light shows, and bad choreography.  Everyone looked and sounded more or less the same. Congrats to the Ukraine! Their song was emo to the max but I guess it meant a lot to her (see below) and the country.

And little Franz of Sweden did alright, as did Australia.  But why is Australia even part of EURO-vision?  Hmmm.  Well here's some background on the winning song, and the video. The afternoon wasn't a total loss as I had lovely friends over, a nice bottle of wine and munchies, and my family rooting along.  Just not how I remembered it I guess.

The 32-year-old winner is a member of the Muslim Tatar minority of Crimea who saw her great-grandmother deported along with 240,000 others by Stalin in the penultimate year of World War II.

Jamala's poignant song opens with the harrowing line: "When strangers are coming, they come to your house, they kill you all and say, 'we're not guilty, not guilty'."

But the memories of that horror have been revived by Russia's seizure of Crimea several weeks after a pro-EU revolt ousted Ukraine's Moscow-backed president in February 2014.

However, Russian lawmakers on Sunday lashed out at arch-rival Ukraine's "political" victory in the Eurovision song contest, as one pro-Kremlin paper insisted Moscow's entrant was robbed.

Ukrainian performer Jamala won the glitzy contest Saturday with her ballad "1944" about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Soviet authorities during World War II in a performance widely seen as a swipe at Moscow over its annexation of the peninsula in 2014.... 

From The Local