So the question you have, most likely, is where have Pooky and the Geek gone?

Simple answer.  It’s cold and flu season.  And I have approximately 27 children (they never stay still enough to get an accurate count).  So naturally everyone gets sick.  Our kids were raised right – they share.  So the past month has been a continuous procession of snot, vomit, coughs, sniffles, late nights with no sleep, and no sleep whatsoever.  And did I mention no sleep?

So I stopped in to drop a few lines and reassure you that indeed we are still alive.  We still blog, if only into our pillows at 3:27 AM while hallucinating about Nordic Butt-kicking Moses.

Uh What?

Yeah that’s right – Nordic Butt-kicking Moses.  See, tomorrow is Thursday.  And that means the kiddos load up into our vehicle and shuttle off to Harrisburg for Classical Conversations.  There, they are educated by the very best homeschool minds of our day and age.  They have to give a weekly presentation, and tomorrow the topic is Renaissance Art.  So my eleven-year old son latched onto the great work of art from Michelangelo Buonarroti – the statue of Moses.

Before you go about thinking that my children are into sipping tea with their pinkies facing out while arguing about opera, I’ll follow up with his criteria in choosing this particular piece of art:

Eleven-Year-Old Boy’s Criteria for Presentation-Worthy Renaissance Art

1. Can’t be naked:  this rules out a great deal of Renaissance art.  Sure, it’s art – but chubby naked people frolicking about in oil paintings is just plain creepy.

2. Moses has horns.

Yeah I thought I’d lose you at that one, so I’ll say it again – Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns.

It turns out Michelangelo should have spent more time studying Greek and less time playing with nunchukas.  What, did you honestly think I would discuss Renaissance art without busting out the Turtles?  But I digress.  Back in the day, Mikey (that’s what his buds probably called him) used the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, translated by Jerome from the Hebrew Masoretic texts.  And while our translations based off the Greek Septuagint would say that Moses’ face shone with light after he came down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the Vulgate translation says he was “horned” with light.  So it wasn’t all that uncommon in that day to depict Moses as having horns.  I imagine it was difficult to sculpt horns of light emanating from his head, so he wound up looking like a satyr.

So anyhow, thanks to the insight of my son, I am now forever tainted in my mental image of Moses.  It does seem much more impressive that a great beast of a man stood before Pharaoh, bellowing out LET MY PEOPLE GO with his great Duck Dynasty beard spilling down over his ripped chest, spiky horns jutting from his brow.  Pharaoh probably wet his kilt.