Who is Ken Lee?

I have a feeling that a lot of the readers of this blog are going to have the same shocking jolt of recognition I did when this young Bulgarian Idol contestant begins to sing. That's partly because I didn't even know Mariah Carey had covered the song in question.

Lest you think I'm being mean by posting this, read the bit of text that's below the video - but not before you watch the video.




*spoiler space*


I think it was 2/3 of the way through the first line that the almost alarming light of recognition went on in my brain.

I don't think Badfinger saw this coming.

I initially hesitated to post this because it did seem to be mocking a very young woman's ignorance. However, according to Wikipedia, Valentina Hasan, the woman in the video, has taken the whole thing with great good humour. When the popularity of the video on YouTube led to her being invited back to the Bulgarian Idol program, she accepted, and performed a much more accurate rendition of the song, good-humouredly singing the last verse in her original mangled phonetic English. She may as well enjoy the brief fame the episode will bring her - a Google search for her name returns 1,270,000 hits, and that's just in the Latin alphabet. A search for the Cyrillic spelling of her name, Валентина Хасан, turns up another 343,000.

ronnie