No, Dustin the Turkey is a puppet that represented Ireland this year. There was quite a fuss about him in advance, so I was curious to see what it's actually like to have a puppet perform a silly song. This is what it was like:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=W31Q4a-bWow

Here is a recap of all 19 songs:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aNw6DjKyJdY

The 10 countries that qualified for the final show are:
Israel, Azerbaijan, Norway, Poland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Armenia, Finland, Romania, Russia, Greece


This year I found it a bit difficult to predict the finalists, although again most of these were pretty clear. I actually expected the Eurovision viewers to vote for such a nonsense like Dustin the Turkey, rather than for something like Romania's entry, but it's not too bad that this did not happen! btw I thought Estonia was worse than Ireland. I guess out of these finalists, Russia and Greece have the best chances in the final. Azerbaijan was pretty interesting, too, so that might get a really good placement, too. It was pretty cool that Finland sang in Finnish! I wonder when Finland last did that. Probably not at all since 1999 when you could choose the language yourself. And I liked the song from San Marino a lot - if only the singer had hit the notes! It sounded like a nice song, though.

I'm pretty sure I've never seen such a small surface to skate on - what was that? They could have given Plushenko some more space to actually skate - maybe Dima Bilan and Edvin Marton shouldn't have taken even more space from him.

Janina.