Totallympics Open International Song Contest 2020

[Vojthas 949]

4 hours ago, heywoodu said:

Every night I print the current Excel sheet, delete it from my laptop with a full wipe of my harddisks and factory reset of my laptop and bring the printout to an undisclosed location in which it's kept safe in a triple-locked vault.

Do you have a red button always with you in case of the recent printout being threatened? You should.

[heywoodu 15,135]

19 minutes ago, Vojthas said:

Do you have a red button always with you in case of the recent printout being threatened? You should.

Red would be a little obvious now wouldn't it?

[heywoodu 15,135]

A total of 24 nations have now voted and Canada, Egypt, Greece, India, Mexico, Slovenia and Tunisia have said they'll vote in time and there's no problem. Ireland's representative is active/online as always, so I'm assuming that'll be fine, and our New Zealand friend has posted he's almost there in terms of getting his list right.

 

All of this means only Germany (@catgamer) and Malta (@Glen) are somewhat worrying at the moment.

[Werloc 3,164]

7 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

A total of 24 nations have now voted and Canada, Egypt, Greece, India, Mexico, Slovenia and Tunisia have said they'll vote in time and there's no problem. Ireland's representative is active/online as always, so I'm assuming that'll be fine, and our New Zealand friend has posted he's almost there in terms of getting his list right.

 

All of this means only Germany (@catgamer) and Malta (@Glen) are somewhat worrying at the moment.

@Glen always finds a way, even when people doubt that he will vote on time

 

@catgamer asked for an extension in this thread till the 29th of October for voting, so the intention of voting should be there

[dcro 10,210]

I guess most of you are familiar with the user interviews at this point.

 

Just a heads up that the publishing will start Saturday.

[Wanderer 1,726]

I will send my votes later today  

[heywoodu 15,135]

Delegation location 7 - Kootwijk

We're back in the real vicinity of Apeldoorn, a few kilometers to the west. In between the forests and the open plains is the little village of Kootwijk, one of not much meaning, as shown by it's number of only 265 inhabitants, including the oldest one, the youngest one and a full 263 people in between.

Kootwijk has some worthy mentions though, starting a little to the south at the Kootwijkerzand. This is the largest area of 'stuifzand' in Western Europe, with 'stuifzand' being the Dutch word for sand that's exclusively moved around by wind and rain. This is a fairly rare sight in modern-day Europe and the Kootwijkerzand is the largest such area in all of Western Europe. More than 4500 years ago people already lived here, farms have been built almost two thousand years ago and from the year 700 on there was a village where now there is sand.

 

A small part of the impressive Kootwijkerzand, an ideal place to to walk around in peace - either together or alone

Kootwijk is also the namesake for the even smaller nearby village of Radio Kootwijk, named after, you guessed it, a shortwave radio transmitter. This was built in the early 20th century in order to streamline communications with the Dutch East Indies, nowadays of course being Indonesia. At the Malabar mountain there was a similar transmitter/receiver stationed in between two mountain walls, the valley of which happened to have been aimed exactly towards Kootwijk. People worked at Radio Kootwijk's station, hence a small - nowadays nearly uninhabited - village arose. The transmitter's buildings still stand tall in the open lands.

 

Radio Kootwijk's transmitter buildings - keep in mind there were four huge transmitter towers positioned in a large square around it, they're gone

Lastly Kootwijk was the location of a darker moment: on 23 August 1950 a F3 or F4 tornado hit the Veluwe, an insanely rare thing in this part of the world. Kootwijk was hit, as well as some other towns mostly to the west of Apeldoorn, but due to the sparse population the personal damage stayed limited to one badly injured person.

 

Delegations in Kootwijk

Indonesia 

Egypt

Slovenia

 

 

[Bohemia 1,411]

Finally sent my votes! I'm frustrated I couldn't give points to more songs, it was really hard to make a choice this year

[OlympicIRL 5,532]

It looks like for the team event we will have 7 teams of 5 nations each (as long as there are no withdrawals).

[Olympian1010 7,971]

I’ll have my votes submitted before the deadline.