SnideAsides

Unexpected news for next season:

I'm pretty confident it won't be Serena for the same reason Naomi felt out of place in Tokyo and the same reason Rio didn't pick Pele: it'll be "Serena Williams: Tennis Legend" lighting the cauldron and not "Serena Williams: Olympian". Same thing with any of the Dream Team members. My left-field pick would probably be Greg Louganis. But I do think the obvious choice is Phelps, both because of his status as an Olympian and because, somehow, it has never been a swimmer before. Even in that big gaggle of people London had, none of them were swimmers. The only thing that's making me less than 100% confident is the games after are in Australia, and you'd have to imagine they'd want to pick Ian Thorpe for it, which may weigh on the decision slightly.

The Australian commentators have just explicitly called out the "final set is now just a big tiebreaker" rule in the men's doubles final a big load of shit invented solely to placate NBC lol

I mean, if you start ruling out every city that'd had bad things happen there decades earlier, you're not going to be able to find anyone to host the thing. That's a bit like saying London shouldn't have hosted because of The Troubles or Seoul shouldn't have hosted because of the Korean War. I don't blame Munich for wanting to change their international reputation. (Apparently Germany announced last week they're going to bid for 2040, and between Bach being German and the fact they're one of only a few places that can still afford it, it seems like it's probably not that far off being a done deal.)

Is there no gala this time around? It's usually one of the more fun things during the Olympics but I can't see it on the schedule anywhere?

It's run by a consortium of public broadcasters with different national laws about advertising on their channels (the BBC for example is so strict that they have to cutaway to precorded skits every year while the hosts are pimping the contest's own CD and DVD), so there's a blanket rule against product placement in order for every act to be shown in every country for people to vote on. If anyone's wondering, Finland finished 19 out of 25 in the final. (Given how obvious it was that Redacted Country was going to try and rig the vote for the PR boost - and they STILL finished second in the public vote to Baby Lasagna - there was a concerted effort to try and unite support around other acts that could do well enough with juries to prevent them from winning, which led to a whole bunch of songs like Finland's doing surprisingly terribly.)

Bit of an odd choice to have 25th Anniversary promo signage so heavily visible at the Riverdance task considering it's 30 in a couple of months. The first performance was April 30th, 1994; it was very famously the interval act at Eurovision that year. (Gaiety Theatre wasn't the venue then - the Point Theatre has since been demolished - but it did host Eurovision in 1971.)

Twice, and both legs have delivered to the point where it's absurd they don't go more often. First leg of TAR12 on the west coast with the highwire bike Road Block and the angry donkeys, and the penultimate leg of TAR22 in Belfast (I know, not technically Ireland, but still on the island) with the Titanic meal service and everyone getting confused over "chartreuse". Oddly a Riverdance-style group of dancers were the greeters in TAR22.

Slovenia was in Yugoslavia. Slovakia was in Czechoslovakia. Given the level of scenery on offer in this episode, it's sort of crazy that this is only the third leg ever in the former Yugoslavia. Massively underused region. Feels like if this show was being made before the fall of communism they'd probably have ended up in Yugoslavia at least as much as they do in Italy and Spain now. (Heck, all of Eastern Europe is underused. There are so many countries they've never touched, and yet this is somehow the first new Eastern European country since the Czech Republic all the way back in TAR15.)

The puteketeke is officially Bird of the Century.

They were spoiled in Jaipur and its surrounding suburbs over four days. Please stop baselessly speculating in the spoiler thread.

Romania is not rumored at all. And Kucing appears to be the Australian version, which is apparently inexplicably spending half its season hopping around Malaysia. The actual route per multiple sources seems to be: Legs 1 and 2: Bangkok and surrounds, Thailand Leg 3: Can Tho, Vietnam Leg 4: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Legs 5 and 6: Jaipur and surrounds, India Leg 7: Cologne, Germany Leg 8: Rural Slovenia Leg 9: Ljubljana, Slovenia Leg 10: Stockholm, Sweden Leg 11: Dublin, Republic of Ireland Leg 12: Seattle, Washington

Caught a clip of the Chinese restaurant episode on Twitter (I haven't been watching this season), and man, it's interesting that the show didn't learn not to fetishise being in the suburbs after all the criticism of that week in All-Stars, especially since they were in one of the exact same suburbs they used that time (Wantirna, where they did the "things people grew in their backyard" Mystery Box). Very bizarre.

Good news! They've banned pre-recorded vocals in Junior Eurovision this year, presumably partly because of all the dance breaks ruining the "song" part of "song contest", so they'll probably wind up being banned in Eurovision mothership again next year.

New season has been delayed because Jock died: