The Daily Gyro (DCGreeks.com)

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04/23	New Event: Kellari Taverna's Monthly Greek Night on Friday, 5/10/24, in Washington, DC!
03/29	Tickets are now on sale for the Chios Societies of the Americas & Canada 67th National Convention from October 11-13, 2024, in Washington, DC!
03/12	Tickets are now on sale for POLIS - The Queen of Cities: A Musical Tribute to the Fall of Constantinople on May 10, 2024 at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, DC!
03/04	Tickets are now on sale for Midwest Greeks 2024 from May 17-19, 2024 in Cleveland, OH!
02/17	New Event: St. George's Greek Festival 2024 on 5/18/24 & 5/19/24 in Bethesda, MD

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The Daily Gyro
Updated Daily on Greek Time

May 23, 2005

On her name day weekend of all days, Greek singer Helena Paparizou has won the Eurovision Song Contest with the addictive “My Number One.” As we had reported in an earlier TDG, Helena was the odds on favorite going into the finals. Hopefully Helena will join ABBA and Celine Dion (competing for Switzerland) as past winners who actually go on to have an international career. The voting for this contest, which sounds as complicated as the electoral college, awards votes from each European country, with the caveat that countries couldn’t vote for their own acts. Greece got the maximum 12 points from an odd assortment of countries – from the obvious Cyprus and Serbia & Montenegro, to the more surprising Albania, Bulgaria, United Kingdom and Germany, to the astonishing, Turkey. Not surprisingly, Greece did not return the favor, not granting Turkey a single vote.

As the rest of the world participated in the mass opening of Star Wars, Episode III this past weekend, about 10% of the population of Greece, namely the whole island of Crete, was shut out. While the rest of Greece enjoyed the fast-paced light saber action of Star Wars, residents of Heraklion, Greece’s third largest city, and the rest of Crete, was subjected to a third week of another sword-and-sandal flick, Kingdom of Heaven, because supposedly ticket sales have been just that strong on the island. Just imagine if Star Wars had been released last year during the run of Troy?

Back to the subject of European contests, Mount Grammos in northern Greece is vying with central Europe’s Danube River for “Landscape of the Year,” an award for the most beautiful nature spot in Europe. Fans of classical music no doubt associate the Danube River with “The Blue Danube,” a waltz by Strauss, featured in everything from commercials, to Bugs Bunny cartoons, to 2001, A Space Odyssey. Meanwhile Mount Grammos is really only known to Greeks as the site of one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Greek Civil War. Now that’s a mountain in need of an image makeover.

According to an AC Nielsen survey, Greece is the seventh most expensive country among the 15 EU members that existed before last year’s expansion. Greeks paid 15% more for their shopping than shoppers in Germany, which was the cheapest of the countries surveyed between May 2002 and June 2003. Greeks paid 54% more for one name-brand of detergent than Germans did, while they paid 58% less for one name-brand shampoo than the Dutch. So according to the laws of supply and demand, Greeks would rather have grungy clothes than grungy hair. Former American Idol contestant Constantine Maroulis would probably agree.

TDG will more than likely be taking an announced break (as opposed to the unannounced breaks we take, which is why we refer to it as “Greek Time” in the caption) for our trip to Clearwater starting on Wednesday and running through Monday. (It’s doubtful any of you will be logging in after Friday anyway.) If you happen to stop by Clearwater sometime this weekend and want to be included in our coverage, come up and say hello, and feel free to tell us how full of it we are, and give us some good material for our sorely-lacking feature articles for the rest of the summer. We’re confident that some of the best topics for feature articles can be extracted at 1:00 A.M. after three Captain and Cokes or during the clarity achieved at 11:00 A.M. the next morning at the Waffle House. If any of you out there are stalking us, please note that we typically register at hotels under assumed names. You can try George Papadopoulos, Jesse Katsopolis, Larry Dallas, or Humberto Gonzalez.