By Tim Querengesser

Since I dig both music and the North, I notice that two are colliding a lot in band names lately. Some make you scratch your head -- what's so "Arctic" about the Arctic Monkeys? -- but some are genuine. Most, though, just show how the world romanticizes Northern remoteness. Or uses it to be ironic.

By Tim Querengesser

Iqaluit recently hosted G7 finance ministers and their entourage, and whoa-nelly, there was a lot of fantastical stuff written about the place and its people. While it's good perhaps for a laugh, and it's good that nobody misspelled the city's name, it does beg the question: How do the media come up with this stuff?

By Tim Querengesser

Houseboats in Yellowknife Bay are iconic symbols of "Northernness." Floating out there in summer or encased in ice throughout the winter, the colourful structures remind us of the anything-goes spirit that inspired us to explore the North or to make it our home. Yet some houseboaters fear a new harbour planning committee created by Yellowknife council will spell the end of this. Is this progress, or yet another blow to "Northernness"?

By Tim Querengesser

When it comes to tracking climate change, the world is using only one thermometre in Canada's Arctic. The Ottawa Citizen recently reported that far fewer Canadian weather stations are being included in global temperature sampling than in the past, from a high of close to 600 in the 1970s to just 35 today. And in the thick of concerns about climate change in the North, only one of them, at Eureka, is being used as the sample for Canada's entire landmass north of the Arctic Circle.

By Katharine Sandiford

We feed them, walk them, brush them and bathe them – heck sometimes we even manually express their swollen anal glands – so why not get something in return once in a while from our pet dogs? Skijoring is by far the best way to extract an easy return: simply harness them up, click on your skis and head down the closest skidoo trail. It's fun. Like really, really fun. “It's like the best Disney ride you could every get,” says skijoring queen of the Yukon, Susie Rogan. And it's growing in popularity.

By Shane Keller

Here's a photo of a moon dog over Yellowknife I took on New Years Eve. According to Wikipedia.org a moon dog “is a relatively rare bright circular spot on a lunar halo caused by the refraction of moonlight by hexagonal-plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds”.

By Tim Querengesser

Whenever someone visits the North they like to try local things. They might eat some bannock, maybe sample some caribou or moose, or go scouting for cranberries. If they're daring they might take a bite of muktuk or igunak or, as French tourists did recently (with not so great results), blue-rare polar bear. But what they often struggle to get is local Northern beer.

By Michael Ganley

The Joint Review Panel looking into the social and environmental impacts of a pipeline down the Mackenzie River valley has delivered its report, more than five years after the project proponents – Imperial Oil et al – filed their environmental impact statement.

By Tim Querengesser

Up Here has long had a group page on Facebook, the social networking site. While it attracted (at last count) 569 members, it often quickly fell from people's radar, buried under the constant updates of friends. Its biggest flaw was that you had to remember to check on it rather than it screaming for your attention. Well, we've finally gone one better by creating a Facebook fan page for Up Here. Now, when we post something like, say, a link to a new feature Up Here story or a juicy bit of Northern news, it'll show up in your live feed. If you're a fan, that is.

By Tim Querengesser

What's an authentic piece of aboriginal art? Or, even harder, what's a fake?