International Song Contest #5

The time has come again, in the past year I found so many good songs from all over the world that I couldn't resist creating another edition of my International Song Contest. And here is something new: the recap video now contains parts of the videoclips of all songs! Hope you all will enjoy this change.

I would like to ask you to make a top 10 of your favorite songs and submit them via the form at the bottom of this post. To encourage active voting, I will send a personal thank you note including a small gift from Holland (or abroad, if you're Dutch) to one of the voters. If you want to win this prize, please write down "Yes! I want to win!" in the Comments section after you finished voting.

Rules:
- To be able to vote, you should have at least listened to the entire recap video.
- Voting goes via the traditional Eurovision-system, so to vote you have to make a top 10 (see voting form below)
- You can vote for your own country (even if you helped me select the song from your country), as long as you promise to vote honestly.
- You can vote until 9 February 9:30pm CET.

After the voting has ended I will publish the results on my blog and make a fancy animation of the voting process, to give you the feeling like you're watching the results of the real Eurovision song contest.

Recap video:

Click here to watch the recap video.

List of participants:

1.	Romania	Vunk ft. Antonia	Pleacă
2.	Poland	Margaret	Thank You Very Much
3.	Uzbekistan	Ulug'bek Rahmatullayev	I Love You
4.	New Zealand	Jackie Thomas	It's Worth It
5.	Norway	Martin Halla	Illuminate The Sky
6.	Ukraine	Potap & Nastya	Miy Otmenyaem
7.	Germany	Michael Schulte	Carry Me Home
8.	Bosnia & Herzegovina	Halid Bešlić i Legende	Tamburasi
9.	Armenia	Luara	Fire In Me
10.	South Africa	NRG	Mayday
11.	Hungary	Gigi Radics	Úgy Fáj
12.	Iceland	Jón Jónsson	All, You, I
13.	Malaysia	Zee Avi	Concrete Wall
14.	Denmark	Apollo	Too Many Nights
15.	Russia	Sergey Lazarev	V Samoye Serdtse
16.	Switzerland	Remady & Manu-L	Holidays
17.	Guatemala	Ricardo Arjona y Gaby Moreno	Fuiste tú
18.	Finland	Satin Circus	If You Love Me
19.	Israel	Chen Aharoni	Crazy
20.	Bulgaria	Mihaela Fileva feat. VenZy	Opasno Blizki
21.	Spain	Adelén	Bombo
22.	Brazil	Luan Santana	Te Vivo

You can access the video on YouTube by clicking on the name of the song.

VOTING IS OVER

New year's resolutions and the prisoner's dilemma

It was the first day of the new year. My friend posted a picture on Facebook of herself on New Year's Eve. She was wearing a tight dress and looked absolutely stunning. Next to her photo she wrote: "Happy New Year! Resolution: lose weight". I wrote to her that she looked fine and didn't need to lose weight at all, but she didn't believe me. I wished her good luck with her weight reduction plan.

Today it's the first Sunday of the year. Like I do on most Sundays, I went to the gym. It was very hectic out there. There was barely enough room to place my bicycle next to the gym and inside I had to wait until I could start my workout, because all treadmills were taken. In the strength zone however I could freely use all machines: here it was not more crowded than on any other Sunday. It goes without saying that this busy first Sunday of January was caused by all those girls who made a new years' resolutions to lose weight. The new girls that I saw didn't look fat at all though. Some might have been a bit chubby, but no-one was fat.

I started wondering: where does this focus on losing weight and being skinny come from? Is it because these girls want to be sexy? Then we must ask ourselves the following question: do guys really prefer a girl with a flat stomach over a girl with some "lovehandles"? The answer to that question is usually negative. Guys don't care so much about the weight of their girl. And it may be a personal preference, but I would actually prefer a girl to have a few extra pounds. Moreover, it would be a big turnoff for me if a girl would be on a diet all the time. (Unless she orders a regular meal in a restaurant anyway, only eats half of it and then gives the rest of her meal to me. I would like that.)

A second reason why girls want to lose weight could be that they want to look pretty compared to other girls. In that case, this situation can easily be translated into an example of the so called Prisoner's Dilemma.
Let's think of a fictional world where there are just two girls who have to decide to either lose weight or stay the same. Assuming that it's uncomfortable to lose weight and that girls feel even more uncomfortable if they are feeling less pretty than the other girl, you can translate the choices both girls have in the following table:

	B loses weight	B doesn't lose weight
A loses weight	Both girls are feeling equally pretty;   both girls are feeling uncomfortable	A feels pretty, B doesn't feel pretty   and is very uncomfortable
A doesn't lose weight	B feels pretty, A doesn't feel pretty   and is very uncomfortable	Both girls are feeling equally pretty; both girls are feeling comfortable

As you can see, the optimal situation here for A and B together is the situation where both girls don't lose weight. They are both feeling equally pretty and are both feeling comfortable. However, if you are girl A and you can't trust the other girl to also not lose weight, you might want to lose weight as well, because otherwise you can end up in a situation where you feel both unpretty and very uncomfortable.

Girl B will think the same way and we will end up in a situation where both girls decide to lose weight, feel equally pretty as they did before and are feeling uncomfortable. The only way they can get to the "optimal" outcome where both girls are feeling comfortable, is if they can both make an agreement to not lose weight. If you translate the message of this example to the real world, it would mean that all girls should sign an agreement that they will not try to lose weight. And that's exactly what I want to achieve with this blog post.

So hereby I kindly ask all girls and women in this world to make an agreement to not lose weight this year.

Thank you.

Coincidentally this would also allow me to do my workout in peace, without having to wait for all those girls on the treadmill. That's not at all important to me though, I wrote this blog post mostly because I care so much about the well-being of girls in this world.

Because after all, I'm such a kind and caring person, who is not sneaky and manipulative at all.