I listen to about half an hour of Today as I’m getting ready each morning. Occasionally, as yesterday morning, I end up shouting at the radio. In this case, it followed a report on whether or not Nottingham is the crime capital of the UK.

After some discussion about the statistics and where towns figured in the crime table*, John Humphrys asked (from memory): “But the Government say that crime is going down, don’t they?” What did that have to do with anything, I demanded from the stereo. The relative levels of crime in different places in a snapshot of time bears no relation at all to the change of crime frequency over time. The fact that you can produce a report calculating likelihood of being a victim of crime in different geographic locations says absolutely nothing at all about the overall crime rate apart from that there is some crime. Grr.

*The word “table” appears to be the 100,000th word on this blog. Woo.

I’m not liveblogging Eurovision – better make that clear. However, I have to mention:

• Switzerland were first up and their multi-national soppy horror If We All Give A Little was as lyrically twee as I thought the first time I heard it. Yuck. If they wanted my vote, they obviously didn’t realise that Give A Little Bit is my least favourite Supertramp song.
• Moldova’s seems to be a bit of a nonsense song and really doesn’t benefit from the rapping.
• Israel’s song is utterly inoffensive, although it does do that annoying thing of featuring lyrics in the native language as well as English. Oh, and it’s dull.

Right, that’s enough of that. I can’t enjoy it properly if I’m blogging 🙂

Update: Lithuania continue to take the mick with their catchy chant – and got booed; the UK’s performance was very good; and Greece’s song turns out to be much better than I remember.

T’other update: Well, that was actually a reasonably credible array of songs. Sweden and Ukraine were better than I expected, and Romania and Armenia were also notable. I’m secretly hoping that Finland will win but it’s wide open as I watch dancers dressed as Orville in the slightly surreal interval act…

Final update: Finland it is! Helsinki next year. You can compare the final results with Mike’s predictions and also read his pretty spot-on reviews of the various tracks. The final score table will no doubt shortly be up on the Eurovision website.

I only watched the first hour of the Eurovision semi-final live because I switched to Big Brother at 9. The freaks at Eurovision had nothing on the housemates… There were the toffs, the idiots, obligatory OTT gays (at least most of the other housemates probably can’t spell “stereotype”), the sociopath, the bimbos… What an awful bunch to be stuck with. One or two might be sane/normal – but for how long?

Back to Eurovision. Despite having ranked Armenia above Slovenia, it was the chap from the latter who gave the better performance but the former who went through to the final (the country’s first). And gosh – Belgium went out! I didn’t notice straight away, it seemed so unlikely. Rob will be disappointed. Other OK tracks that went through include the entries from Russia, Turkey and Bosnia – plus the mighty Lordi from Finland. Alas, Ireland and the nonsense from Lithuania also qualified.

I’m starting to consider the possiblity that Finland will win. Not having been sold on Sweden, I suspect I’ll end up voting for Finland and Germany.

Big Brother house collapses – no survivors.

In other news, the nation’s average IQ doubles.