This morning I woke up, as usual, with a song in my head. But soon thereafter it became a tree. My favorite tree growing up; it still stands on Wellington Road. I don't know what kind of tree it is.
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I know the leaves, I know the berries, I know the bark. I know how it branches and I know the sound of the wind through its leaves. I know what it looks like in the summer and in the winter. I know what the grain of it looks like when you cut it with a saw. I know what the berries tastes like when they're ripe and I know how firm they are when they are not. I know how to get the stains out of clothes that the berries make, and I know what it feels like to get hit in the face with one thrown by a neighbor behind a trashcan top shield.
But I don't know what the name of the tree is. So if I wanted to plant one or ask about one, I'd have to motor over to Wellington and point to it and say 'this'. You'd think the internet could help, but you'd be wrong.
I suspect that there are thousands of people who know that tree as well as I do, and surely most of them, being Americans from Los Angeles, have computers. Sometimes it gets tiring talking about movies and restaurants, but you wouldn't know that from the creators of Web 2.0 and social media. And so I am thinking, like a database guy thinks, about how to improve on:
People have done a bang-up job with restaurants. But the whole world isn't urban, nor is the whole urban world man-made. You would think that with all the green-think that somebody would think about figuring out how to query up and tally flowers, trees and shrubbery. But if you ask a bloke about shrubbery, he might as well say 'Ni'. And that's a Monty Python joke that has more fans than Ligustrum x ibolium.
It shouldn't have to be that way. This is another application of Fingerbox.
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