Some of you folks know about the book "Big Dead Place" already:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/books/01stra.html
My friend Nicholas Johnson who has been around for both the winters that I have (McMurdo 2001, Pole 2004) wrote a book about the McMurdo winter. I won't repeat the NYT review but it's everything that doesn't get printed in the National Geographic-style books. Work politics, sex, drinking - consider yourselves warned. Insanely funny. Not much about me or anything that was important in my winter, it's Nick's winter, but everything in there really happened. I'm not one of the names-changed-to-protect-whomevers, but he does mention the First Amendment posters I put up when things started to get really silly.
I do want to make it clear that Big Hand George was *not* part of the blues band. The band was my family and the T-Site incident was unfortunate and not caused by one of us.
For comparison, what I wrote home about that year (summer at Pole, winter at McMurdo) is at http://www.murkworks.net/~sarah/dispatches.html.
I hope you're all well! I'll write more in September, assuming I go off to Palmer Station as scheduled.
Best,
-Sarah