Sunday saw an historic event in Germany.
After failing thrice before, football club FSV Mainz 05 achieved promotion to the 1. Bundeliga for the first time ever. Tobias is doubtless rapt with joy even now.

To honour the stalwart lads from Rheinland-Pfalz I have composed a wee verse:

Climb whither thou couldst not before, now
Freed at last of gravity’s restraints,
To the Empyrean on eagle’s wings,
O thou heroic FSV Mainz!

I’m no Alfred L. Tennyson, but I think that’s pretty good, if I say so myself. If you think the rhyme doesn’t quite work, well, you’re wrong (and Tobias can tell you why). There’s terror and pity in there, too, if you know where to look for it. The eagle, you see, is the symbol of Eintracht Frankfurt, who were relegated to the 2. Bundesliga the day before, effectively swapping places with Mainz. One year ago, it was Frankfurt that achieved promotion to the top flight, pipping FSV at the post at (literally) the last minute. Now, as Mainz erupts in celebration, the Eintracht walks the walk of shame (though never, one is confident, alone). To continue in our artsy-fartsy poetical mode, let us imagine a discarded scarf lying in a gutter, emblazoned ‘Eintracht Frankfurt 2002/2003: Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

In other news, Germany elected a president or something yesterday.

With the Eurovision Song Contest now completed for another year, it’s time for another international contest of intrigue, bargaining and frankly bizarre voting. In other words, the IOC today announced the shortlist of cities to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

Four European cities have made the shortlist: Paris, Madrid, London and Moscow, with New York the only non-European city remaining in the race. Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Leipzig and Havana were all excluded from the shortlist.

The GamesBids website has good coverage of the procedure to select the host city, with ongoing assesments and ratings of the candidate cities. As their ratings of the cities show, Rio’s exclusion from the shortlist was quite a shock, as it had been seen as a very strong bid, especially as the Games haven’t been held in Latin America before.

Paris appears to be the favourite at this stage, though Madrid does appear to be gaining strength (the IOC ranked it second of the five shortlisted bids) as time goes by but may be hampered by the fact that the 1992 Olympics were also in Spain. However, Olympic voting is one of the hardest things in the world to predict, and it’d take a braver person than me to predict which city will be chosen when the IOC meets in Singapore next year.

Well, the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest has ended with yet another country scoring a first ever victory – Ukraine. What seemed like several hours of voting ended with a rather comfortable victory for Ruslana’s Wild Dances in the end or, in simpler terms, the ex-Soviet block voting proved stronger than the Balkan block voting. The question of what may or may not have been the best song is pretty much irrelevant at this point, and I can’t enlighten you at all as to which may or may not have been the best as I didn’t see any of them! Please feel free to argue in the comments as to which song may actually haver been the best…

Update: The full scoreboard can be found on the official site – it’s a javascript pop up from the front page (‘final results’). Ukraine had 280 points, Serbia & Montenegro 263, Greece 252. Seven-time winners Ireland came next-to-last, only receiving 7 points – all from the UK – with Norway last receiving only 3 points, all from Sweden.