This time our … national vision had a name: Sakis Rouvas. A "national vision" with … a toned body, a cute face and a shining smile! A smile that not only managed to win girlies all over Athens and Corfu but of Istanbul too, if you can believe the extensive and full of seriousness reports from Turkey.

So we have Sakis. He was blessed by the Patriarch! And apart from happy and moved female reporters, several serious politics wished him luck on his "ordeal". You see on Ipektsi Stadium, Sakis represented Greece. And he did so in the American way. With a very rhythmic choreography that involved a lot of brio, and a little bit of strip – tease.

And still we got bunged. All of our hopes for triumph were shattered from the teams of the far of Ukraine and the near by Serbia & Montenegro. We end up third and literally sweaty. And Sakis was not to blame for that. He "gave it all" on stage but the "others" didn't give us what was our due!

Let's get serious. Eurovision is not a contest where all the European countries participate each year represented by their best song writers and singers. It's just a cheap show, where lights, clothes and public relations are more important than anything else. Things like music and lyrics and voice have very little to do with this show.

NET for years considers this bubble very important. And really believes in our participation in this …. Great contest. The people of national television really believe that this contest is a way of promoting Greek music and are willing to spend a lot of money to do just that. But you can't have a Greek song with English lyrics and music that has very little to do with our culture. And that culture when it was not at it's lowest has given miracles to the world (remember sirtaki?)

I agree with a newscaster that wrote "Some people consider Esc a celebration of songs. I agree but we are talking about songs without origin, songs that are bad imitations of American songs. We are talking about songs that are not meant for listening but for consuming like anything else …"

Translator's notes:

The people who actually wrote and published that article are some of those "serious and educated" reporters that promote "quality". He made several mistakes. No 1: The songs were not sang in "American" because there is no such language. They were sang in English and England is a European country. No 2: Pop is not an American product. It's an English product. The first representatives of that kind of song were "The Beatles" and they were English to the bone. Of course pop like any kind of music is always influenced by other types of music and cultures. So what? No 3: Whether we like it or not, our age has one international language and that is English.

Let's get another thing straight. Pop is a very popular genre of music. True it hasn't originated from Greece, but so what? Pop music was adopted by most countries. We have English pop songs, French pop songs, Italian pop songs and naturally Greek pop songs. Some of them were actually international hits. Just remember the `60s. Esc is a contest about pop music. So we cannot have "ethnic" songs in that competition. If you don't like pop music that's fine. But you have no right go around and trashing everything and insulting all these people who actually like that kind of music.