Rennaissance Man

7th grade history has, just before everyone gets terminally distracted by Christmas, reached the renaissance, leaving behind the medeival times (about which my kid learned that their art was 'incredibly lame").

So she comes home yesterday and asks who the most important renaissance person is. Although it is obviously Hieronymous Bosch, she's not ready for that news, and so I went with Leonardo. She was thrilled with my apparently correct choice, and we agreed that it was because he did so many things. Some people were great artists or poets or scientists, but Leonardo did all that, invented that crazy cool helicopter thingy (I don't give a damn whether it worked, just to come up with that at all is great), did autopsies, and was no slouch at math. skcawkcab etirw dluoc oeL ytfeL, sulp and.

It was a good talk, and later we were telling her mom about it, and how the teacher read my daughter's paragraph to the class as a good explanation of the changes accompanying the emergence of humanism (is there anything that could make an anthropologist dad prouder?!). And told her that we liked DaVinci's diversety of talents.

So mom looks at daughter as says, "Yeah, but he couldn't knit."

And daughter and dad immediately answer, "Yes he could! He invented macrame!"

So yeah, I guess there is something that could make this dad prouder than humanistic academic triumph: well-timed comedic smartassery.