Schlumbergera seedling 092

Seedling 092 isn't terribly special. It's maybe more of a red-orange than orange, but even so, we've seen this before.

However, it did do one thing I've never seen before: as it was winding down for the year, it produced this flower:

I don't know exactly what went wrong here, but I'm fascinated by it, because it went wrong in a very specific-seeming way. It's sort of like, it built the base and the tip of a flower, but left out the whole middle? I bet there's a really interesting sciencey explanation for what happened here, and I bet I never find out what it is.

*sigh*

So. The shape of the later, deformed bloom, with all the little stamens spraying out in different directions, makes me think of sparks from metal-grinding (e.g.). Even though it's not what the plant's normally going to produce, I feel like the fact that it's done it once means I can consider Sparky.

For color, I'm feeling drawn to bringing Kimchi back again. No particular reason; just seems right.

Recently, during a what-things-are-orange brainstorming session, I remembered the movie Run Lola Run (original German title: Lola rennt), starring Franka Potente as the titular Lola. In the movie, she has bright orange/red hair --

-- which may not be an exact color match for the bloom, but it's damn close.

And I really liked the movie. So, the pop cultural slot will be filled by Lola.

(I think I'll just skip the previously-considered category this time; I'm already considering Kimchi again, and none of the other previouslies look good to me today.)

Finally, in the "whatever" category: the very long list of words I mentioned some time ago is still a work in progress (though in the month and a half since I started working on it, I've managed to evaluate 186,000 words -- only 51,000 left to go!), and I'm pretty sure it's going to need considerable tweaking before it's a good way to get name suggestions. I mean, best case scenario, I'm figuring it'll mostly be useful for the 2016-17 crop, not the one I'm currently trying to name. But as a test run, let's see what happens if I allow myself to sort of free-associate off of whatever words the list hands me, and change parts of speech when necessary.

From 45 random word-pairs, I got 23 that I could shoehorn into making any kind of sense, though in one case I had to ask Google for help.¹ I cut those 23 down to the three that I found most appealing: Mostly Harmless (the title of a book by Douglas Adams), Everybody's Different (which I like mostly for the irony²), and Where'd You Last See It, which is one of those Culture-Ship names that are always tempting but too long to be practical. The one that I decided to use for the "whatever" slot is Everybody's Different.

So, to recap, we have Sparky, Kimchi, Lola, and Everybody's Different.

I'll drop Kimchi, because I feel like it wants an oranger seedling. And Everybody's Different works well enough, but I really like Sparky and Lola.

Choosing between Sparky and Lola was sort of agonizing, because I like them both a lot, but in the end, I'm going with Sparky. The odds are good that I'll see another Lola-colored bloom before I see another Sparky-shaped one, after all.

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¹ Names (in bold), and original word pair (italics):
• Vicariously Burly (burly vicariously)
• Dick Control (control dick)
• Caller ID (call telling)
• Weeping Tendencies (tendency weepy)
• Lever of Immortality (immortality lever)
• Aristocrats (maybe aristocrat)
• Accidentally Employable (employable accident)
• Panpipes (piped finger)
• Magician's Dove (theatrical dove)
• Nonzero (number infinitesimal)
• Everybody's Different (different everybody)
• Wastewater Treatment (separates detritus)
• Where'd You Last See It (identify point)
• If Both (both conditional)
• Sacrament of Pills (pharmacy sacrament)
• Growing Family (family grow)
• Confidential Help (confide help)
• Better Brains (synapses better)
• Bowling League (together league)
• Feel, Play, Love (play feel)
• Mostly Harmless (harmlessly most)
• Computer Ranch (farmer technical)
• Mice as Much (from the Google results for "nearly mice;" appears to be a text-recognition error that returns "nearly mice as" for "nearly twice as" in multiple scanned documents. Original word pair was "near mice.")
² I mean, sure, technically the Schlumbergera seedlings are all different from one another, but I'd be hard pressed to describe any meaningful difference between, for example, 033 Clueless and 035A Patito. It's more appropriate for this particular seedling, because of the deformed bloom.