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?

Exhibit one: Before the G7 conference, The Times of London ran a column where the writer talked of British finance minister Alistair Darling traveling to Baffin Island, where "For much of the year, the sparse population -- just 11,000 -- exists in an icy twilight zone, with only seals and whales to talk to."

Um, has this newspaper heard of summer? Of telephones? Internet? A lot of people on Baffin Island have that stuff, too.

Exhibit two: Iqaluit, said Fox News, is "cold enough to freeze a can of 10W30." Um, no, it doesn't exactly freeze. Surely your new Alaskan correspondent, Sarah Palin, could tell you that? And besides, it was minus-20 or so during the conference. That's a typical winter temperature . . . in Minnesota. Residents of Green Bay must really struggle to walk everywhere with all that frozen 10W30 in their cars.

Exhibit three: In the Independent, another British newspaper, in a column titled "Polite guests always eat the weirdest meat," humour writer Philip Hensher, who didn't go to Iqaluit, wrote that at the dinner featuring seal meat, caribou, musk ox and char, "the waitresses wore sealskin hairpieces; the chairs were covered with sealskin; the goodie bags were made out of seals."

The truth is less exciting. The waitresses had sealskin hairpins; the goody bags contained sealskin vests and mittens (holy awesome swag!) and the chairs, like those in the Nunavut legislature, were covered in sealskin.

Sheesh.