Hi All, Lane County Extension Service Master Gardener John Fischer here with KLCC's Good Gardening. In December, I like to give the garden advice a rest, and explore a different topic. Today it will be my perfect attributes - according to King Edward II, and Leonardo da Vinci.
My wingspan - the distance from the fingertips of your outstretched arms is the same as my height; 6 feet 3 inches. Of course that doesn't make it perfect, but it does match da Vinci's idealized guy standing in a square and a circle - the Vitruvian man.
It makes fun holiday party conversation as many people will think their height is greater than their wingspan.
Longer arms can have advantages - like a record number of Olympic medals. Swimmer Michael Phelps has a wingspan three inches longer than his height, and the gold medals to prove it. Swimmer Johnny Weismuller - who later played Tarzan - is thought to have similarly long arms on his 6-foot-3-inch- frame.
Short arms were an advantage for cloth merchants, as a yard was the distance from the tip of the nose to the end of the thumb. Michael Phelps would suffer selling fabric.
Another standard measure where I excel - at least if you ask King Edward II- is my foot; it is twelve inches long. Despite having worked with the much more convenient metric system in my professional meteorological career, I have a fondness for the foot, pound, and inch system. As lady Gaga says, "I was born this way."
But only recently did I learn that the division of the foot into 12 inches may be because it is more easily divisible by two. three, four, and six, or because early counting was done via finger segments - three on each finger times four fingers equals 12.
Now let's get back to my garden and it's imperfections - branches broken by too much fruit, spaghetti squash eliminated by squash bugs, a bumper crop of broccoli - and aphids.
Maybe next year it will measure up.
