The winner of the Danish X-Factor 2009 was Linda Andrews. A 35 year old woman with a great voice, who managed to tell her story and get people involved in her private struggles against cruel people and comforteating. She sort of made a symbol out of herself of overcoming and not-putting-up-with-the-cruel-world - OMG, she pulled an Obama on us!
"A voice can tell many things.About pain, the joy and variety of other emotions, but to communicate through song, it is rarely credible and genuine unless you have some stories and experiences you are willing to share with the world."
Bah.
Blachman, the transgressive judge, commented on her suffering story on and off the show that "this is not Oprah Winfrey ffs"! But maybe they should change it to the Oprah Winfrey-Factor show!?
This was her final performance:
Well well well... Ok, so she got a million kroner record deal. And congratulations. Update: article and discussion at pol.dk about DR not mentioning that Linda already was a semi-pro singer before the contest. (translated)
These are the 3 most viewed videos on Youtube from X-Factor 2009 in Denmark: 1. Lucas - Tainted Love (show 2)
2. Alien Beat Club - Warwick Avenue
3. Mohamed - One thing
Alien Beat Clubs (second, with 2 percent less votes than Linda) performance in the final:
Thanks to all the performers and judges for great family entertainment you can trust - see you next year!
Over at the AllFacebook blog Nick O'Neill got me answering a question about the new Facebook design:
Have you found the new design easy to use?
Well, here's my answer:
I don’t think it is a question about whether the new design is easy to use or not. It’s a question about the new design and feed algorithms impairing what was good about Facebook.
My two examples:
Applications you have not added can post feeds on your Wall!! (I just got an application feed on my wall from Friends For Sale! - An app I would never add and don’t want to pollute my pages)
Applications appear more in the News Feed / Live Feed and the only way to opt-out is by hiding your friends using the apps. With the old design you could hide the applications (I don’t want to hide interesting friends just because they got a fling with some stupid app. I want the good old fb algorithm to know that I hate apps, just like it used to know.)
Well, at least I see an upside to this bad change of design:
I’m from Denmark where Facebook is huge (more than 1/3 is on) and Twitter so far has only been for the really net-savvy. But since the new Facebook came on, it seems the early adopters and the early majority is being pushed over to Twitter (people following me, and asking in their fb status updates who is on Twitter!). This is good news for Danish information seekers and Twitter, but a bad move for Facebook the company because they are pushing people to Twitter - not the opposite.
An easy swing had its time shouldered -slow bending axe. now it's a photo framed. the swing hasn't had it.
and here we are rebuilding roads right by roosting towns. it's just like the love -the one that's never been enough.
so I’m counting on your fingers cause you've reattached the twitch and if you want opinion, I will die along the ditches.
and every summer is a hot token to the cold, cold take of lust. and every autumn singes with the business of sadness.
friend, how the grown May sing: "honey let it burn" and the curve in the county is ??? ????????
so I’m counting on your fingers cause you've reattached the twitch and if you want opinion, I will die along the ditches.
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From a Red Hot compilation: Dark was the night. Also listen to "Cello Song"!
Bonus info: Revenue from the compilation will benefit the Red Hot Organization – an international charity dedicated to raising money and awareness for HIV and AIDS through popular culture. Other Bon Iver posts Other Bon Iver lyrics
100 years of prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution, The Economist writes in a leader from 5/3-09.
I agree that legalisation seems to be the best solution to a global crisis on the rise.
There's something rotten... globally! In Denmark we are in the midst of what Danish media and politicians has named "the Gang War" (bandekrigen). Drug cartels are fighting about the Danish drug market in a more and more fiercely manner. Since August 2008 the drug war has resulted in around 50 shootings and 5 killings.
These numbers are shocking in Denmark, but they are nothing compared to other countries. From August-December there has been 2540 drug war related deaths in Mexico and more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006. Gangsters are ruining the Mexican economy. In Afghanistan the drug cartels has already ruined the economy.
Honduras suffers 5-7 drug related murders a day, which led President Manuel Zelaya to call on the United States to legalize drugs. Clearly this issue is global and only a global solution is possible. A solution which forces us to rethink the criminalization of drugs, but which will have immense positive spill-over effects on troubled countries.
A public health issue, not a criminal issue The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy has made some recommendations to President Barack Obama to consider new policies, such as decriminalization of cannabis and to treat drug use as a public health problem and not as a security problem. The Netherlands has had a pragmatic policy of treating drug use as a public health problem and not a criminal issue through partial legalisation of soft drugs (cannabis) for some years now.
"Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children."
In Denmark parents are fearing for their children too - that they might be the next (innocent) victims of the ongoing drug war. Decriminalisation of drugs is not an easy issue and it would certainly have to be carried out with great care, but with more and more drug-related murders all over the world, can we afford not trying the least bad solution!??
Over at the 
