Eurovision 2008: Armenia

Tuomo writes: Next in line is Armenia, another small landlocked mountaineous country. Interestingly in course of the past couple of days I have read several articles on Armenia. The tone in both British Airways' inflight magazine and this morning's Hufvudstadsbladet made the country appear like an interesting destination for a holiday. As for Eurovision, the oldest Christian country in the world has been surprisingly successful having made it to the much sought-after placing in the top ten to make it directly to the finals the following their first year. And if my memory does not fail me Armenia fared pretty well in Helsinki. This year Armenia features Shirusho and Qele Qele:

http://www.eurovision.tv/medialounge/video/609



I can't claim I know much about Armenian except that it features a bunch of consonant clusters and other sounds that practically require plastic surgery to be able to produce them accurately :-) While I'm sure the the letter in Qele qele represents a stop sound that's produced somewhere in the pharynx while squeezing your diaphragm and turning blue in the face, it still sounds like a boring unvoiced and unaspirated velar stop /k/to me. And therefore qele to me sounds like -kele, the way a certain swearword in Finnish is pronounced when one wants to spare the ears of infants and other weak in mind :-) So this one gets the tee hee hee prize of the year...!

As for the song itself (huh?), this was quite a number: a juicy cocktail spiced with exotic sounds and rhythms. The jiggling boob factor accented by voluptuously swaying hips should push, shove, and thrust this one to the finals...