2-Ply and Some Photo Controversy

Yes, I am talking about toilet paper.  We finally have 2-ply toilet paper in McMurdo! Well, it has been here for years, but it's been sitting in a cold dark warehouse behind thousands of rolls of 1-ply.  Not too far off in his description, the wastewater technician recently said he could count the tree rings in the old toilet paper.  The last of 1-ply is still lingering in rarely used bathrooms around station and fully stocked in the dorms that are closed down for the winter, waiting for the new arrivals in October...the folks that arrive back for the summer will never know...well a few of them might read this. Whoops.  I had come accustomed to it and didn't notice how bad it was until I opened that first roll of 2-ply yesterday.  I won't give you details, but what a difference! My boss from this summer left me a few rolls of coveted 3-ply that was sent to her from the States.  With the major delays in getting mail down here during the summer season she didn't have time to use it all before she left.  I told her I'd think of her when I used it.  Okay, enough about TP in Antarctica.

I know everyone has seen that photo already.  It is one of my favorite photos of people that I have taken down here.  The empty flagpoles pointing at the last plane leaving and everyone looking up to catch the last glimpse of their missed escape captures the exact feeling I was hoping to get when I walked over to the champagne toast with my camera.  I shared it with many of may coworkers and it soon made it into two articles in the Antarctic Sun newspaper:  

http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=2825

and 

http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/aroundTheContinent/contentHandler.cfm?id=1201

Notice that the photos in the newspaper have no watermark on them and the one that I posted above does.  This is the result of an original publishing of the above photo on the front cover of the weekly McMurdo station report that is sent out to hundreds of people at the Antarctic Support Contract headquarters in Denver, CO, the National Science Foundation in Washinton, D.C.  This report was immediately rejected because of my photo. Because it has a watermark on the corner.  Apparently official government documents cannot use "copyrighted" photos.  The station manager then went up to the vehicle maintenance shop and took a picture of someone working on a truck and used that for the official report.  So to be safe we used the photo without the watermark for the newspaper articles.