But Is It "Google Big?"
From an article by the BBC, about a giant self-destructing palm tree so big that it can “be seen on Google Earth:”
“At first there’s only a very long shoot like asparagus from the top of the tree and then, a few weeks later, this unique shoot starts to spread.
“At the end of this process you can have something like a Christmas tree.”
[…]
The branches then become covered with hundreds of tiny flowers, which are pollinated and turn into fruit; but the tree expends so much energy on flowering that it eventually collapses and dies.
What’s weird to me is the use of the phrase, “so big it can be seen on Google Earth.” This is not the first time I’ve heard this phrase, but probably the first time it was used in a story that wasn’t itself about Google Earth or technology of some kind. Is this the new standard of bigness, roughly analogue to “can be seen from space,” or “can be seen from the moon?” I’m not complaining (“Damn kids and yer Goo-Gohl”), I’m just always surprised by the ever-gaining ubiquity of everyone’s favorite search engine/ad company/second brain. Ubiquity isn’t something you’re supposed to be able to get more of.
Anyway, we had a Century Plant (which has a similar flowering pattern) when I was a kid, and I remember the day it shot its blooming vegetable penis high into the air, then promptly keeled over and wilted into what resembled a very disappointed Dane Cook. It was magical.
Fri., Jan. 18, 2008
Reader Comments (2)
I remember we used to have a century plant too. It reminds me of a peace lily or stargazers. The latter almost looks like a Friz Freleng dynamite explosion in a vagina, beautiful.
If we knew Dane Cook's address, I know a blood-thirsty gang of coked-up beartraps that could help us make him just a memory.
We could strap Dane Cook onto a young century plant and wait for it to sodomize him to death after about 30 years. We could take bets for the exact minute when they would finally "consummate."
Oh, man, price this out for me. Let's make it happen.