Stop Deep Sea Mining Before it Begins!!

If your in Canada, please sign this petition to protect the deep sea. Apparently we’ve not yet started mining the deep sea, but we all know how hard it is to stop something profitable when it gets going!

https://act.gp/3KdQtTa

and if you’re in the USA: 

https://engage.us.greenpeace.org/6-YhFpwE3Uabcls1_nS8tA2?utm_source=website&utm_medium=actioncard&sourceid=1012578&_ga=2.213870036.1540959328.1681848093-1831250267.1681848093

Just wanted to share, because the petition doesn't have very many signatures. Also, support Greenpeace if you can!

BobStool_BobJones is an instagram account with now 108 comments from the young folks on their post of the Positive letter from Eric Hutton. You can read it here.

I've downloaded the entire thread, but really most of it is just the same-old, same-old. What the kids don't realize is that their arguments are only going to harden the Board of Trustees against Steve Pettit.

As WutBJU has pointed out for years: Pettit has completely lost control of the student body.

Charisse Lane of Blaxit fame announces:

Yeah, that's not going to happen. Anywhere. Students don't "vote" on who should be president in any school anywhere, let alone BJU.

Of course, Bob 3 gets his share of shade:

Son, this is only going to make the Board of Trustees all the more resistant to listening.

Member of the Class of 2025, Toby Jorgensen, tries to explain, but he either trips up and adds an unintended NOT or he's accidentally telling the truth about how BJU students are taught about

And then from the complete lack of any good sense files is Tim Hill:

Sigh. . . . Bless.

pettition for randy cunnhingham season 3 😎

Michael Pettit (South African,b.1950)

At Night, February 1998

oil on canvas

Progress on the unicorn and stag tapestry! It might not look it but I have completed all the coloured thread on the left quarter! Just needs filling with black (⁠人⁠ ⁠•͈⁠ᴗ⁠•͈⁠)

My great uncle is going up to the ISS for the 4th time in September!! I remember my grandpa e-mailing him during his first half-year trip in 2002/3 as well as trying to point high-powered lasers and light flashes when we saw it traveling over (turns out he was asleep during then, oops!)

If I'm correct, he's the oldest active astronaut

bonus, my sister and I in space to celebrate our highschool graduation

Antarcticans

I may not have used my sketchbook as much as I thought I would, with regard to locations, but I did fill a few pages with one of my favourite pastimes back in The World: people sketching.

My biggest anxiety about going to McMurdo was the human factor.  Whether it was school or work, a recurring motif in my life is that I do not do well in a big box full of Americans, and that is, almost literally, exactly what McMurdo is.  Sure, the continent wants to kill you, and every way of getting to and around it comes with risk of serious accident, but the only thing I was actually afraid of was finding myself in a stressful social situation and not having any recourse to escape.  I know how to build a snow cave.  I don't know how to deflect the ire of people who've taken a set against me – and, for whatever reason, I tend to rub people in the States the wrong way.  When I was shortlisted for the placement, the person handling the admin briefed me about the process and asked me if I had any further questions, and I raised this concern.  She responded that, speaking purely from her own experience, she had never felt more comfortable being herself than when she was at McMurdo.  Not knowing who 'herself' was, I took this with a grain of salt, but it was an encouraging answer nonetheless.

It turned out that the best thing about McMurdo was, in fact, those very people I had been afraid of.  Everyone I met was absolutely splendid.  In my first days there, my supervisor joked that if you shake the world, all the best people end up at the bottom; the remainder of my time there proved how right she was.  One of the main things that attracted me to the Terra Nova story, and has kept me committed to it for so long, was how wonderful the people were – far outside what I had come to expect from humanity.  Warm, genuine, accepting of and attentive to each other, a wide range of personalities and dispositions that nevertheless got on and functioned together as a society, in the face of environmental and emotional extremes ... I needed to know such people were possible, and clung to them as an ideal.  It was a wonderful surprise to discover that they would not be out of place amongst their modern counterparts.

Is it because they're scientists, as someone theorised? But they're not – most of the people at McMurdo are support staff, working in the kitchen or waste disposal or shuttle fleet; helping the science happen, yes, but that's not necessarily why they're there, personally.  Is it because a harsh environment triggers something in the human psyche to support each other, rather than compete?  Maybe, but these people seem like they'd be solid wherever they are, and were like that before going South.  

I suspect there is an element of self-selection – something about the sort of person who would want to go to Antarctica correlates with a certain mindset, one that gels extremely well with others who share it, however different they may be in other respects.  There is no denying that everyone there is a bit odd.  They tend to be types that exist on the fringes back in The World and, like me, may struggle to conform to its values.  A few years ago, I came across this adage from an Antarctic veteran: "You go the first time for the adventure.  You go the second time to relive the first time.  You go the third time because you don't belong anywhere else."  Many of them live in remote places, or travel, or do itinerant work when not on the Ice.  There is a bit of a running gag in Where'd You Go, Bernadette? that everyone doing a mundane job in Antarctica is a high achiever in something amazing, who left it all behind – and that's not exactly untrue.  Perhaps what unites Antarcticans is an awareness of what really matters, when you get right down to it: they've played the game enough to see through it, and are done with it.  "Glory? He knew it for a bubble: he had proved himself to himself. He was not worrying about glory. Power? He had power." So Cherry wrote about Wilson in 1948, but many modern Antarcticans might sympathise.  When you come out the other side of self-aggrandisement and jockeying for status, and are happy just to be yourself and let others be themselves, you get a happy, harmonious society.  Or so it would seem.

At midnight on my last day there, I had a deep conversation with someone I'd only met in passing before, but who was totally down to have a long talk with a random stranger on a footbridge in the middle of the night. I presented her my hypothesis that no one at McMurdo was popular in high school.  No, she replied; there may be a handful who were popular in high school ... but they're not popular at McMurdo.  Maybe the secret is in there somewhere.

Anyway, I didn't do nearly as much people sketching as I'd have liked, given that the base was populated entirely by Characters, but these are the pages I did manage to get. 

Two pages of random McMurdites, likely in the Galley:

These last four are from a meeting where team leaders were presenting their projects to some high muckymucks visiting from the NSF. I was only there because my project was allotted a space in the presentation, but the main focus was the massive Thwaites Glacier project, a collaboration between the US Antarctic Program and the British Antarctic Survey to study one of the most unstable regions in Antarctica.  They quite rightly took up the whole meeting time, and the privilege of being there meant I learned a lot about the project.  My longstanding habit is to draw during meetings, so I captured some of them in my sketchbook while absorbing the science into my head.

Notable characters in my sketches include: - David Vaughan, heading up the British contingent of the Thwaites team, was quite an engaging and affable guy but had a concentration scowl that puts mine in the shade. I was shocked when I heard he died of cancer earlier this year (2023) – a great loss to BAS, glaciology, and Antarctic science generally. - When Erin Pettit isn't studying glaciers with an eye to climate change, she's taking girls on wilderness adventures to foster an interest in science and art, as well as self-confidence. - Britney Schmidt, Queen of Icefin, not only earned my profound respect but has a whole episode of PBS's Terra dedicated to her work developing sub-ice autonomous robots with the aim of exploring Europa. (Seriously, so cool.)

I could go on about Antarctic people, but there's nothing so good as showing you, and luckily I can do just that. PBS sent a small team down in 2018 to do a YouTube series, and one of their episodes is all about the cool people who call McMurdo home.  It might make my point better than all my whittering, and is certainly more fun. If you'd like to see more, Werner Herzog's film Encounters at the End of the World is much of the same, but more so.  It had been recommended to me several times, but I hadn't managed to get my hands on it until a week before I left, when it turned out a Cambridge friend had a copy and lent it to me.  'I don't know how true it is,' he said, 'but I want it to be.'  When I got back, I was happy to confirm to him that it was, indeed, exactly like that.  And I miss it so much.

The Positive-for-Pettit Turkey Bowl does have full stands. It looks like a lot of students from this vantage point. What do you think?

Oh look!

See it?

And here:

They've got their Positive for Pettit buttons on.

Bless 'em.

TOP 10 NBA PLAYERS WITH THE MOST HOLDERS OF "NBA MOST VALUABLE PLAYER" OF NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - 6x NBA Most Valuable Player (1971, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980)

Bill Russell - 5x NBA Most Valuable Player (1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965)

Michael Jordan - 5x NBA Most Valuable Player (1988, 1991, 1992, 1996, 1998)

Wilt Chamberlain - 4x NBA Most Valuable Player (1960, 1966, 1967, 1968)

LeBron James - 4x NBA Most Valuable Player (2009, 2010, 2012, 2013)

Moses Malone - 3x NBA Most Valuable Player (1979, 1982, 1983)

Larry Bird - 3x NBA Most Valuable Player (1984, 1985, 1986)

Magic Johnson - 3x NBA Most Valuable Player (1987, 1989, 1990)

Bob Pettit - 2x NBA Most Valuable Player (1956, 1959)

Karl Malone - 2x NBA Most Valuable Player (1997, 1999)

Good morning!

Michael Pettit (South African,b.1950)

Still Life on Table

oil on board

Mel Pettit

Adrienne Naval

Treadmill Meatwad from the season 10 episode. Muscles. Drawn by longtime ATHF BG artist, Bob Pettit

Testament (Lynne Littman, 1983).