The annual Eurovision Song Contest was held in Helsinki this year, and took place yesterday after a week of special events, street parties, and Arcada’s hugely ambitious DINA Host City broadcasting extravaganza.

This is a complete list of the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest, including the names of the songwriters (whom I was moved to include when I realised that Serge Gainsbourg had written a winning entry for Luxembourg).

Although many people think that Finns are unavoidably wacky as a result of cultural artifacts like The Leningrad Cowboys and the record-breaking Eurovision entry that was Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah, the cultural climate is quite often conservative. We saw this quite clearly tonight in the televised finals to choose this year’s entry for the contest that will be held in Oslo sometime in summer.

We have just completed a forty hour festival in Rosario, our virtual culture experiment in Second Life. It was a night-time festival that lasted for ten consecutive nights and, because SL has four hour “days”, this meant that, in reality, it lasted for ten one-hour sessions, which took place every four hours.