Water Ink

OK, for those of you wondering what’s the fuss about, here are the vidoes of Mary-Jess Leaverland, who is on the front page of today’s Guardian. Her victory in a “Chinese X Factor” competition is reported by several papers (Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Sun).

The TV singing competition is called Min Ge Chang Fan Tian (民歌唱翻天, literally means “stars from ordinary people singing over the heaven”), organised by a TV channel in Jiangsu Province.

The vidoes show the final round. At the begining the first video, three competitors were presented, then the second runner-up was out, followed by the duel between the last two who each sang the final song, before the phone-in results were announced (in the second video). Mary-Jess Leaverland was called by her Chinese name Li Meijie (李美洁) throughout.

This video shows the round before that, begining with the “grand entry” of the last three competitors. Mary-Jess Leaverland spoke Mandarin in her intro video (at 6’30”), but it looks when it came to singing, she still preferred English songs.

Yes it is cold out there. It hasn’t been so cold for so long for many years in the UK. Minus 20C is cold. But why the British media insist that here is “almost as cold as the South Pole”? Times put it in the headline, Guardian and Telegraph (“only 2C warmer than the South Pole”) said so. The comparison is too good to miss for Channel 4 News and BBC News as well.

The temperature at the South Pole is about -22C to -25C at the moment. It is technically true that the coldest place in the UK is only a couple of degrees warmer than the South Pole. But I’m wondering whether the journalists realised, or chose to ignore the fact that it is summer now at Antarctica?