Which way is up?

I read this comic here: Operation Tony

And aside from noticing this was an oversimplified and totally useless solution, I realized, I see Earth in a very specific way.

I saw this frame:

And my first thought was they had the oil drip wrong.....

No the fact that it was dripping off the Earth away from all the objects shown didn't bother me.   It was that the spill was placed on the 'bottom' of the Earth.

The spill I hear is in the Gulf of Mexico, which is in the middle of the world when you put the North Pole at the top.  Found a map here to show location and size.

And yet, why would a space carrot have to approach the world from the top?

A quick google image search shows Earth is nearly always rotated so that the North pole is up....(Not to mention they usually show South America).  Do folk in space go out of their way to always orient the camera that way or do we rotate the photos?

And what if I lived in China, or Russia, how would the earth be shown?

The one photo that was most likely not rotated is this:

Earth from the moon

Unfortunately I can't tell from the photo which part of the Earth is being shown.

Ah well, space travel and such are far enough in the future, I wont have to learn not to call North 'up' anytime soon.