It's very strange to go into a 10 acre indoor space filled with living plants and full scale landscape designs. Here's a slide show in quicktime. It's one of those disjunctions that occurs with modern transportation and simulation. Here's a permalink to the NYTimes article. What's really bizarre is they talk about how the Men's Garden Club of Philadelphia created a simulation of an Irish village complete with a pub.
"More manly fantasies awaited. The enterprising Men’s Garden Club of Philadelphia has constructed a whole landscaped village street, with the requisite Irish pub. Burke Brothers Landscape Contractors created an idyllic putting green, antique-wheeled bag and clubs at the ready. I leaned in to examine the thoughtfully labeled cranberry cotoneaster and heard what sounded like a long, loud burp. The intent, apparently, was to replicate the swish of a golf swing and the sound of a disturbed frog."
It shall not pass!
> I mean you can't make this stuff up!!
I hearby announce that I am going to war w/ this particular phrase.
& yes, I know it's current right now, & what it means, & how it's used, however despite my distaste for the practice of taking slang or pop phrases literally, I can't help it -- this one makes my fingernails itch, my hair curl, & my face hurt.
It is the cynosure of the contemporary trend to deprivilege creativity. It is part & parcel of the mind-killing tropes of confusing information w/ intellect, & reference w/ vision.
Who "can't make it up"? You (whoever) certainly aren't talking to me. I could easily make up such a thing (tho I wouldn't) & if you (whoever) liked that then you'll love the millions of far better scenarios inhabiting the realm of Fiction.
I am already living in a world w/ more of what I despise than ever. I'm not going to take this one. I will not stand for invention being reduced to something for the R&D dept or the Patent Office. I will not stand for the enhancement of fact which becomes coercive advertisement instead of Lore. I will not stand for those incapable of generative cognition telling me that I too suffer from such a malady.
I can make up a lot of stuff. I can make up a world not doomed to the creeping death of orchestrated stupidity. Regrettably such a construct, projected beyond my own skull, is a tenuous proposition at best.
Bah.