The Weekend Blow By Blow

Lordy Lordi
The winning entry in this year's Eurovision song contest comes from Finland.

Dressed as bloodthirsty orcs and warning Europe to "get ready to get scared" the rockers from Arctic Lapland took the stage as Eurovision outsiders and left as winners who had taken the contest to what Terry Wogan described as a new level of foolishness with their song Hard Rock Hallelujah.

The cartoon metalheads wore latex monster masks and played spark-spewing instruments as they sang: "Wings on my back, I got horns on my head/ My fangs are sharp and my eyes are red."
And they found that a combination of shock and comedy value made them irresistible to several hundred million TV viewers, many voting by phone and text message. Lordi gained 292 points, the highest score in Eurovision history, and their crushing victory was heralded as a turning point for a contest for years dominated by lightweight pop and sugary ballads. "This is proof that there were rock fans watching Eurovision," said the group's singer, Mr Lordi. "This is a victory for rock music and also a victory for open-mindedness." Terry Wogan, doyen of British Eurovision TV coverage, jokingly described the performance as "nicely understated" and added "every year I expect it to be less foolish, and every year it's more so".

Despite giving Finland its first win, Lordi's shock tactics have not met universal approval at home. Scratching his nose with his plastic talon after his band's victory, Mr Lordi said: "In Finland, they've said things like we eat babies for Christmas. Whenever we appear in public people there do their best to ignore us ... We are not Satanists. We are not devil-worshippers. This is entertainment. Underneath [the mask] there's a boring normal guy, who walks the dogs, goes to the supermarket, watches DVDs, eats candies. You really don't want to see him."

Finland's president Tarja Halonen congratulated the band with a telegram, and the culture minister, Tanja Karpela, said it showed Finnish music could succeed abroad. As Finns celebrated on the streets of Helsinki, Satu Puolakka, a 19-year-old student, struggled to come to terms with her new heritage. "It's not Sibelius, but they have their own way," she said. Others had been so determined to end Finland's history of failure in the contest that they launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the band's pyrotechnics.

The win was seen as a victory for silliness in a contest which, in recent years, has seen some po-faced attempts at victory, notably from the UK, which drafted in Jonathan King in 1995 to produce a "credible" entry from Love City Groove. Lordi's victory has confirmed such tactics were a wrong turn.

Here's the performance, already up on the net. Thanks to GK for those links.

There was also this delightful critique from the Times:

IT WAS perhaps the most disturbing performance in the 50-year history of the Eurovision Song Contest, but Finnish rock group Lordi captured the imagination of viewers to win the contest with a record score.
The rockers swept to victory in Athens despite, or possibly because of, widespread protests by Christian groups. Millions fell so heavily for Hard Rock Hallelujah’s thumping rhythms and latex horror masks that they now seem poised for a new level of stardom.

Industry observers are wondering whether Lordi are set to become the unlikeliest heirs to the competition’s great success stories: Abba, Bucks Fizz, Dana and Céline Dion.

The band’s victory was rapturously welcomed in Finland, a country that had never before come close to winning Eurovision. The headline in Finland’s leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, read: “It’s official: Hell has frozen over. Finland has won.” Lordi’s victory had disproved the claim that intelligent life would be found on Mars before Finland won the Eurovision Song contest, the paper added.

Eight countries, including Britain, gave Lordi the maximum 12 points, enabling them to accumulate 292 points overall — the highest tally in the contest’s history.

Hard Rock Hallelujah was played in Finnish bars and restaurants into the small hours of Sunday morning.

Although most readers will not have heard of them, Lordi are no overnight success story.

The band’s greatest hits compilation has been released in 20 countries and its debut album Get Heavy went platinum in Finland in 2002, but before Saturday’s competition the group had yet to make an impact in the English-speaking world.

At home there was intense debate over whether they would disgrace Finland’s reputation. Songs about the “Arockolypse” and the “Day of Rockoning” blend religious imagery with tongue-in-cheek rock posturing. But lead singer Mr Lordi (real name Tomi Putaansuu) denies that there is anything more sinister going on.

“We have nothing to do with satan worshipping — this is entertainment,” he said. Born in Lapland, he also said that the band would never remove their masks.

Not everyone is impressed with Lordi’s victory. Father Mitro Repo, an Orthodox Christian clergyman in Helsinki, described the band’s use of the name Lordi as “sacrilege”.

Greece’s Orthodox Church has also deplored its triumph. “Who would have expected that the first prize could have gone to those who showed up (looking) like monsters,” Archbishop Christodoulos said.

That is the height of awesomeness when a 'joke' band takes out the comp.

From The Pleiadean Mailbag
It was a very big week trawling the net for Pleiades. Here are some links that came in over the weekend...

The Big Dam(n) in China.

The last of 16 million tonnes of concrete will be poured in today, making Chairman Mao's dream of a reality, and giving China's current generation of engineers-turned-leaders the chance to proclaim another colossal step forward in the country's "harmonious development".

But the completion of the Three Gorges dam has been anything but harmonious. It is now being cited as a textbook example of how not to build a dam. Before it even starts operating, the giant hydro-electric scheme is threatened by silt - the solution to which is to pour yet more concrete into the Yangtse river.

About Halliburton Part 1.
They're serious about this weird suit being the answer to global warming.
UPDATE: I screwed up. This is actually a satire site.

An advanced new technology will keep corporate managers safe even when climate change makes life as we know it impossible. [Speech, photos]

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

Most scientists believe global warming is certain to cause an accelerating onslaught of hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, etc. and that a world-destroying disaster is increasingly possible. For example, Arctic melt has slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in just the last decade; if the Gulf Stream stops, Europe will suddenly become just as cold as Alaska. Global heat and flooding events are also increasingly possible.

In order to head off such catastrophic scenarios, scientists agree we must reduce our carbon emissions by 70% within the next few years. Doing that would seriously undermine corporate profits, however, and so a more forward-thinking solution is needed.

At today's conference, Wolf and a colleague demonstrated three SurvivaBall mockups, and described how the units will sustainably protect managers from natural or cultural disturbances of any intensity or duration. The devices - looking like huge inflatable orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.

"It's essentially a gated community for one," said Wolf.

...and here's Part 2 watching this company we've come to love to loathe.

The new report (the third in the series) is being issued on the eve of Halliburton 's annual general meeting in Duncan, Oklahoma, on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006. It documents:

* how the company management in Iraq and Kuwait has cheated taxpayers out of millions of dollars through bribery and waste;

* how the company has increased its profits in Iraq by employing sweatshop Asian labor and refusing to pay injury claims;

* how senior management used worker's pensions to pay for management benefits, despite the fact that the soaring stock price has made the top managers tens of millions of dollars.

Today as the military slows its purchases of Halliburton services in Iraq, the company is diversifying into such profitable areas as the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf States and the provision of direct services to the oil and gas industry abroad.

In the latter part of this report, we show that the company's biggest profit center, energy services, has been fraught with charges of bribery and political meddling in Iran and Nigeria.

* Its hydraulic fracturing operations in the United States have had disastrous impacts on the environment, including community water supplies;

* It's lobbying efforts have prevented legally mandated regulatory oversight.

A possible draft of a letter from GWB to Ahmeni-jihad...?

To: President of Iran

From: President of Amurrica

Mr. Moo-uh Abba-dabba-jen,

After carefully listening to a one minute summary prepared by my staff of your recent 18 page letter complaining about so-called wars of aggression by the US, torture and one-sided blind support of Israel, I have decided to write a letter back since -after all- I am the decider.

You clearly do not understand democracy, which is why you are part of the “Axis of Evil.” While you were elected president by a majority of your people, I became president in the year 2000 with a minority of the vote. While your latest election used paper ballots, which allow double checking of the vote, I was elected in 2004 by electronic voting machines in all the key states with no verifiable paper trail. Clearly our democracy is superior to your so-called democracy.

I intend to use the utmost restraint when dealing with your country, Iran. I will not take any rash actions. I will use the same deliberation and careful judgment that I have used before. This is why I plan to hold a prolonged conference with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and the CEO of Halliburton before deciding if an attack on Iran should take place this summer or after the November election.

It's a sad thing that satire like this is chilling for their insight rather than funny. Says a lot about our times.

A possible British solution to their fresh water problems...

Britain's biggest water supplier, Thames Water, is seriously considering towing icebergs from the Arctic to London to solve what could be the worst shortage in a century, a newspaper says.

"We have to look at any possible alternative, including towing icebergs from the Arctic and seeding rain clouds," The Times quoted Richard Aylard, of Thames Water in London.

Admitting that many people might find the idea "daft," he could not rule out using icebergs. Thames Water has not determined whether it would make most sense to bring in icebergs from Greenland or northern Scandinavia, he added.

Aylard said other plans included transporting water across the North Sea by tanker from Scandinavia.

"Tankers from Scotland and Norway are something that has been looked at. If we get into an emergency situation that's the kind of thing we would be looking at," he said.

He said that bringing water by road has been considered but all but rejected, because it would not be a feasible way to supply quickly millions of people.

What are they going to do when the Icecap is completely gone, due to global warming?

Here's an article archived on Rense.com about the relationship between the US Dollar and Oil.
And that is the tale of the tape from Pleiades this week.

Fantasy Sport Report
My AFL fantasy league trudged aacrosss the line for a lame win against the 'Fredo Frogs' (now there's a name that inspires fear). It wasn't close, even though my players ha pretty bad weeks. I felt my team regressed considerably from their peak-like performance in the previous week, which leave me at 6th with a 4-1 record. Next week's opponent is 'Ian's UK Challenge' which will be pretty stiff, followed by PJ's 'Sydney Scorpions' which is going to be the toughest matchup until I face 'Boutros Boutros' and his 'UN Peacekeepers'..

Amazingly, PJ leapt off the mat this week with a rise of 14 points in the Jack Kerouac Memorial league. My team has held steady at 3rd.

As the World Cup approaches I'm going to put together a fantasy team for that too; and I'm trying to start up a league for the World Cup as well. This ought to be fun - in for a penny, in for a pounding.

Kircher Link
I've replaced the Hoagland link with the Kircher society because Hoagland stopped writing on his blog 7-8 months ago. Today's interesting Kircher link is this one about the highest parachutist Joe Kittinger.

Some months ago, we came across this photo on BldgBlog and were reminded of the story of Joe Kittinger, unheralded U.S. Air Force pilot and Hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society. On August 16, 1960, Kittinger was lifted 31,333 meters into the sky in a pressurized balloon. At the end of his three-hour ascent, at the edge of space, looking out across the arc of Earth, he opened the capsule and jumped into the vanishingly thin air. During his 26 km freefall, which lasted four and a half minutes, he accelerated to 990 km/hr, becoming both the first man to touch outer space and the first to break the sound barrier outside of an aircraft. Fortunately for those of us who will never get to have such an exotic experience ourselves, he brought a camera with him:

Now, the film he shot is pretty astonishing even on lo-res. Make sure you check it out!

Cleaning Up
We've been cleaning up around this house this weekend. It was one big assault on stuff put in storage by people who lived through the depression and decided throwing anything out was bad. Those people have passed on but their legacy of junk has remained. With the permission of the landlord, we've been tossing out huge quantities of what can only be described as CRAP. It's amazing what 40 years of hoarding can accomplish: You can live in a huge house and not notice it's huge, for instance. Anyway, we've got some space now.