The "father knows best" adage often breaks down completely when put to the test. Fathers are shown to not know very much, perhaps less than their kids, in the narrow instance of providing answers during visits to museums.
Doug Hardy was barely inside the door of the National Air and Space Museum when he made up his first "fact."
On a sunny morning a few days before Father's Day, Hardy and his son Andrei were huddled under the Mercury capsule. Like countless dads before him, he was explaining rocket science to his boy, in this case how the mottled heat shield protected John Glenn from a fiery death as the craft plunged through the atmosphere.
Then Andrei, 12, asked: What are these dark disks made of?
Again, like countless dads before him, Hardy answered confidently -- even though he didn't have a clue.
"Steel," he said.
(The shield is actually made from a plastic-fiberglass composite, said Michael Neufeld, chairman of the museum's space history division. The disks are plugs left over from post-flight analysis.)
If it didn't occur to Hardy to say, "I don't know," he's not alone. The phenomenon of the "know-it-all dad" is a familiar one to the docents, curators and keepers of America's museums and zoos. ...
One area where kids often have an edge on their parents is wildlife biology, thanks to endless critter shows on cable TV and a steady stream of Internet-researched animal reports for school.
"I hear kids correcting their dads all the time on the difference between insects and spiders or great apes versus monkeys," said Alan Peters, curator of the National Zoo's Invertebrate House. "As a parent, you have to keep yourself in check or you'll get yourself in trouble."
So, why does this story resonate with me?
Way back in the early 1990s after the Jurassic Park franchise got rolling, a guy named Phillip Currie came to Regina. He was the top paleontologist at the Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., which is located in the heart of one of the world's most fertile fossil-collecting areas.
Anyways, Currie was speaking at some high school and I was told to go cover him. When I listened to some of the kids questioning him afterwards, I thought Currie was being questioned by his peers, not high school kids.
They were playing way above my head. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
Professional journalist, eh? :)