Pretty picture: Zygolum Louisendorf [grex]

For reasons I do not understand, but would like to understand, some sites include "grex" as part of the name of this plant, i.e., "Zygolum Louisendorf grex" instead of the more typical "Zygolum Louisendorf." I don't believe I've ever seen this before. So if you know why people are bothering to write an extra word that would normally be assumed anyway, please leave a comment, 'cause I'm curious.

I appreciate the oddness of the brown/purple color combination, but I don't particularly find it pleasant.¹ It's kind of what the Zygo- hybrids do, though, see Zygoneria Adelaide Meadows, Zygopetalum (Kiwi Klassic x Mishima Goddess), Zygopetalum Art[h]ur² Elle, and Zygopetalum Jumping Jack. (The resemblance to Artur Elle is particularly strong, which makes sense, since Artur Elle is the pollen parent.)

Zygolum Louisendorf = Zygosepalum labiosum x Zygopetalum Artur Elle (Ref.)

Zygosepalum labiosum has a very broad, white labellum (lip), and doesn't look much like Louisendorf at all. In case you were wondering.

-

¹ Most of the photos on-line show a much darker brown, sometimes verging on black. (e.g.) Which I kind of like better, I think, but it'd still be a stretch to say I liked it liked it.
² Some sites have this as "Artur Elle," without the "h," though I included the "h" in the previous post because that was how it was tagged. I didn't feel like spending the time today trying to find out whether or not the "h" belongs there, but I'm guessing that the h-less version is correct, since it's what the International Orchid Registry has. So I'm going h-less for this post.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 182

Seedling 182 is an oddball; it's only bloomed twice so far, and the two flowers don't entirely make sense as the product of a single seedling. This is just sort of how the 2016-17 season has been, alas. Many of the seedlings this year have either been oddly inconsistent in bloom color, or they've been consistent, but diverged from previous years' blooms. 182's first bloom was a pretty typical red-orange / pink, except both colors were several shades lighter than any previous red-orange / pink,

and then the second bloom, three days later, was a much more common orange / light pink combo.

Probably the second bloom is the "real" color (with "real" here meaning "the color one would normally expect the flowers to be"), because that's less interesting than the other possible outcome, but until there's a tie-breaker I suppose we're free to imagine whatever we want, so let's go ahead and consider both possibilities.

Oh, it's also the first seedling from the NOID magenta to bloom. I'm a bit disappointed that this isn't more obvious from its appearance. (I've gotten flowers from ten of the NOID magenta seedlings, and only one looks it at all: the others were either white/white, or indistinguishable from some of the past 'Caribbean Dancer' seedlings. This is sort of abstractly interesting because it was unexpected, but obviously I'm disappointed.)

182A's blooms were also both a bit . . . I don't know how to describe it exactly. Frazzled-looking? "Ratty" would be overstating things, but it's somewhere in that neighborhood.

The name options this time around are mostly unfamiliar and goofy-sounding words: Kaylee (I said "mostly"), Divoon, Padparadscha, and Fazoozle. Kaylee is, of course, a reference to the character from Firefly:¹ not only had I wanted to name a seedling for her anyway, but the first flower's colors were very close to the colors of the dress she wore in the episode "Shindig," though it's very difficult to get a screencap to prove that because the lighting in the relevant scenes tends to be tinted. The best image I could find, with a little modification:

Original image: cap-that.com. I cropped this one, and lightened it a little.

The flower again, for comparison. You see the similarity, right?
Anyway. Divoon is simultaneously a reference to Jayne Mansfield and to the Siouxie and the Banshees song "Kiss Them for Me," which is . . . about Jayne Mansfield. I guess Mansfield liked to use the word. Why this seedling specifically? Well, the "Kiss Them for Me" video has a lot of light pinks and orangey-pinks in it.

Okay, maybe it's a little more purple than orange. But there's overlap. (Screencaps from the "Kiss Them for Me" video on YouTube.)
Padparadscha is to orangey-pink as ruby is to deep red, more or less.² There doesn't seem to be a very precise definition of padparadscha; judging by the image search results I got from DuckDuckGo (most of which images appear to have come from the Natural Sapphire Company), it covers natural sapphires which are lavender, pinkish-purple, pink, pinkish-orange, light orange, orange, or reddish-orange. Which means it'd work as a name for pretty much any non-red Schlumbergera seedling I want, ever, but maybe this seedling in particular, since it is apparently capable of producing a range of colors.

First page of DuckDuckGo image search results for padparadscha. Cropped, resized, and rearranged (with considerable effort!) by mr_subjunctive.
And finally, Fazoozle, which I first encountered at MetaFilter, as an onomatopoeia for the sound an inflated but not tied-off balloon makes when it is released and goes flying around the room. Searching the net finds it also as the title of a short story,³ a username on a number of forums (which may or may not all belong to the same person), and a website that I didn't investigate because it seemed a little sketchy. Not sure what this means. From the balloon-related meaning, I thought it might be appropriate for a flower that was slightly disheveled.

So okay. I think I can drop Fazoozle; I liked it when I thought it was just the sound, but finding out about the other uses has kind of scared me off. And Divoon might be better suited to a pink or lavender-pink seedling.

Which leaves Kaylee or Padparadscha.

[ponders]

And that decision comes down to a question of what I think the "real" color of the blooms is likely to be, after all. If the first, lighter bloom is typical, then I want it to be Kaylee, otherwise Padparadscha. Historically, seedlings with really pale blooms seem to either stay the same, get darker, or flop back and forth between the two, and it seems like the lighter the first bloom, the more likely they are to get darker (e.g. 061A Leather Fairy) or alternate (e.g. 099A Dessert Room). So my guess is that 182A is going to wind up being a boring orange/pink in the long run, and therefore should probably be 182A Padparadscha even if I would otherwise prefer Kaylee.

-

¹ (Played by Jewel Staite)
² The mineral corundum (aluminum oxide) is colorless when pure, but natural corundum often contains impurities which impart a color. Chromium yields pink to red shades (rubies), vanadium turns them purple (purple sapphire), iron turns them light yellow or green, and iron with titanium yields blue (sapphire). I couldn't find any definitive statements about which elements are responsible for padparadscha, though I'd guess some combination of chromium (pink) and iron (yellow)?
³ In the collection Elza of Prague, by Mel Klein, which if I'm reading the synopses correctly the gist is that a man decides (threatens?) to name a child "Fazoozle" in order to spite an overbearing mother-in-law. Not sure if this makes it more suitable, or less suitable, as a seedling name.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Imperial Jade 'Timberlane'

Yellow-brown is, as noted in a previous post, an allowed color for jade, so I suppose technically I have to be okay with a yellow-brown flower named "Imperial Jade."

But secretly, deep down, I am not okay with it.¹

I'm pretty sure the spotting at the top of this flower is mechanical damage. I have in my notes from last year that I'm pretty sure it's not mechanical damage, but, you know, we were all a lot dumber and more naive back then.

Imperial Jade is a primary hybrid (hybrid of two species, as opposed to a hybrid of a species and a hybrid, or a hybrid and a hybrid):

Paphiopedilum Imperial Jade = Paphiopedilum stonei x Paphiopedilum primulinum (Ref.)

I haven't seen Imperial Jade before, but I've seen some of its relatives. Related on the Paph. stonei side is Paph. Lady Isabel (from the 2013 show), which is also a primary hybrid. On the Paph. primulinum side of the family, we've seen Paph. primulinum itself (2016), Paph. Pinocchio (2013), and Paph. Prim-N-Proper (2012). I don't feel like Imperial Jade particularly resembles any of its relatives, but I suppose you can decide about that for yourself.

-

¹ (I realize I have no room to point fingers about color accuracy in plant names, considering how some of the Schlumbergeras have behaved.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 203

The more seedlings there are to keep track of, the harder it is to distinguish between them, so I can't tell you a whole lot about 203A that isn't obvious from the photos.

Mostly: the colors are loud. Which is fine. I think I prefer the seedlings with strong, fully-saturated colors to the more pastel ones anyway.

For 203A, the four name candidates are: Dolly Parton, Flamboyant Tendency, Loud and Clear, and What About My Needs.

203A was early enough in the season that the tears in the petals here were probably mechanical, the result of them catching on other plants (or the flats, or the shelves) when getting moved around. The thrips normally don't eat all the way through a petal anyway, just scrape off a thick enough layer to make the flower ugly and then move on. That said, I suppose it's possible that the thrips are learning new things.
I think I can drop Loud and Clear right away. It's not inappropriate, but it's sort of a cliche. Pretty much the same goes for Flamboyant Tendency -- actually now that I look at it, "Tendency" adds nothing: it should have just been Flamboyant.

What About My Needs is a Culture ship name.¹ At 19 characters long (including spaces), it wouldn't be the longest name I've used,² but it's pretty long. It sort of works, in that the loud-and-screamy colors seem to go nicely with a phrase that is normally loudly screamed. I guess. The other option left is Dolly Parton, who, as previously noted, is delightful³ and totally seedling-worthy, and has also been on my mind a lot lately.

Poor What About My Needs never really stood a chance. I hereby christen 203A Dolly Parton.

-

¹ Culture ship names, discussed here, are so named because they resemble names of spaceships in Iain M. Banks' series of novels about the galaxy-spanning civilization called the Culture (hence the name); they're not necessarily names that were actually used in the novels though. Culture ship names are distinguished mostly by their length, and are often but not always a full grammatically-correct sentence.
² That would be 082A Strawberry Madeleine, which is 20 characters long. What About My Needs would tie 084A Downward-Facing Dog for second-longest.
The list of prospective names technically maxes out at 30 characters (Fictitious Canadian Girlfriend), but that's the only option I have with more than 25 characters.
I don't know if there's an official character limit for cultivar names or not, but I read some naming guide a while back that I think said to stick to 30 or fewer characters, and I figured 25 would be even safer. I had also been trying to keep names at one or two words long, but I've broken that rule a few times already (020A Feet Of Clay, 066B Sigrid the Haughty, 083B Guy Fawkes Night, 084A Downward-Facing Dog, 103B Must Be Love, 105A Berry Rhubarb Fool, 106A Jaws of Elmo, and 200A Breakin' The Law. And yes, I'm aware that I'm being inconsistent about capitalization of small words -- 020A Feet Of Clay but 106A Jaws of Elmo, for example -- and it bothers me too and I intend to do something about it sooner or later, don't you worry.), and the prospects list goes up to at least five- and six-word options (Will They Or Won't They, I Thought We'd Get Out, Let Me Count The Ways, A Banjo Like The Moon, I Want To Be Sedated, You Don't Want Me No More, I Want To Go To There), though I don't know how seriously I'm taking any of them as possible names.
I admit to finding A Banjo Like The Moon bizarrely appealing; it was in the running for seedling 127A until I decided I liked another banjo-related name better.
³ The late Roger Ebert described meeting Dolly in person (to do a one-on-one interview in promotion of her movie Nine To Five) thusly:

As we spoke, I found myself enveloped by her presence. This had nothing to do with sex appeal. Far from it. It was as if I were being mesmerized by a benevolent power. I left the room in a cloud of good feeling. Next day, Siskel and I were sitting next to each other on an airplane. "This will sound crazy," he said, "but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers."

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis [probably not] Minho Princess

Of all the reasons not to go to the orchid show this year, I think the one closest to my heart is that it will prevent me from seeing a new batch of incorrectly-spelled orchid ID tags.

It's not that misspellings are traumatic in themselves. This one isn't even that bad, all things considered: a simple transposition of two vowels from a combination which doesn't appear that often in modern English (AE) to a combination that does (EA). Totally understandable. What really gets to me, though, is the lack of proofreading. You've already made the sign, it's sitting there right in front of you, you're looking at it -- how do you not pause for a fraction of a second to ask yourself, does this look right?

Or maybe it did look right. Which is perhaps even more upsetting.

Anyway. Thank you for indulging me in one more grumpy orchid-proofreading ramble before I stop doing the orchid posts. To reward you, I will tell you that the letters of the word "Phalaenopsis" can be rearranged in 59,875,200 distinguishable permutations,¹ including "a snail shoppe," "a posh spaniel," "hapless piano," and "polishes a pan."

So this is the plant in question. I think there's a pretty good chance that it isn't Minho Princess. Why? I couldn't find any photos of Minho Princess on-line that looked like this. I mean, I suppose it could just be a really variable grex, but the photos I found all showed a mostly white flower, with a little pink-purple along the largest veins, and some more pink-purple at the margins. (Example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6²) The online photos for a highly-variable grex shouldn't be this uniform. So I conclude that somewhere along the line, the wrong ID became associated with the plant, probably at the original seller. Sellers don't think their customers give a crap about IDs, so they don't feel like they have to give a crap about IDs either.

I like the plant. The blooms are obviously pretty striking close-up, but the contrast was visible from surprisingly far away, too. I wish there was some way of, you know, learning the name of this plant that I like.

[Phalaenopsis Minho Princess = Phalaenopsis Sun Prince x Phalaenopsis Ta Lin Freeds (Ref.), though that doesn't matter because this isn't Minho Princess.]

In (now somewhat-old) Anthurium news, I purged the Anthuriums in the living room, the ancestral varieties that produced all the original seedlings. 'Pandola' is gone. The NOID red is gone. The NOID dark red that never bloomed is gone. 'Gemini' is gone. 'White Gemini' is gone. 'Peppermint Gemini' is gone. 'Orange Hot' is gone. All three copies of the NOID pink are gone. 'Krypton' is gone. The NOID red-violet that might or might not have also been 'Krypton' is gone. All four of the 'Florida's are gone (though I'm pretty sure they never contributed anything genetically. Moral support, perhaps.).

There were also a couple ancestral plants in the basement, pre-purge. The NOID pink-green is gone. 'Joli' is gone. The small pot of salvaged cuttings from the NOID purple, which had only just gotten old enough to bloom, is gone.

My goodness. So what isn't gone, Mr. S.?

The NOID purple, and two backup copies of 'Red Hot.' And one 'Red Hot' is looking a little shaky, to be honest.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, in theory, the genes from the founding generation are present in the surviving seedlings; the founders had already made themselves redundant. Not to mention that there were ghost mites, Xanthomonas, or both, on all the plants I threw out, and it's good to get rid of pest/disease reservoirs. On the other hand, this means that if I were to decide to start over with the seedlings, I'd have to buy new Anthuriums to start over with. And, as it happens, the ex-job is now even more of an ex-job than it used to be, because they're no longer in business, so I'm not even sure where I'd get the replacement Anthuriums from.³

In any case. The founding-Anthuriums purge is upsetting, and also it's not.⁴ Just like the ex-job closing is both upsetting and not. Ditto the really big plant-related thing I've alluded to a few times now but haven't been able to bring myself to name and describe yet, which was both devastating and an enormous relief. The last three months have been fucking weird.

-

¹ Assuming that my math is correct. A twelve-letter word in which no letters are duplicated should have 12! (= 479,001,600) different permutations; since "phalaenopsis" has three letters duplicated (a, p, and s), I think the number of combinations should be 12!/(2^3) = 59,875,200.
² In March or April last year, I found two more sites which showed Minho Princess with the same coloration as the others; those links have since 404ed. But six examples should be enough to get the idea.
³ They announced this in mid-November. I think this was a deliberate decision to retire, rather than the owners finding themselves forced out by the economic climate or whatever. But they'd been talking about closing or relocating since at least 2008, and since I didn't go back to chat with them or anyone else who worked there, I'm not sure that it wasn't motivated by declining sales.
I never understood how they could price plants at triple the big-box and grocery-store prices and stay in business in the first place. But then, I don't have a keen business mind.
Should note that I don't feel particularly upset about the ex-job being gone. I rarely visited anymore; when I did, I didn't generally buy anything. There are also some not-great memories associated with the place, which time has faded but not eliminated entirely: although things weren't super-ugly when I left, the bad was outweighing the good by that point. (Some of this was my fault, some of it wasn't. Somewhere in my various files is a draft for a blog post titled "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Garden Center Workers." Which is still good advice. Eight years since I left, and I still can't look at poinsettias without a small jolt of dread.)
Still. End of an era, and all that. I don't entirely understand why I didn't go back to see the place one last time, or talk to the people who still worked there. Had I visited early enough, I could even have picked up some new houseplants for a mere 2.25 times the big-box price. It wasn't that I didn't care, but -- the idea of going back to see the store gradually clear out made me uneasy in some difficult-to-explain way, so I never did. And now it's gone. Or gone-ish, anyway.
Also: if a family-owned garden center in the area had to close down, why couldn't it have been Pierson's?
⁴ Watering the living room for the first time, post-purge, took me 3.7 hours. That no doubt sounds like a lot of time to spend watering, but the most recent five pre-purge waterings took 4.3, 5.1, 5.4, 5.5, and 6.4 hours. Not only do I save time watering, but I no longer have those periodic pangs of should I throw this one out? Is that Xanthomonas? Are those ghost mites? to deal with. It's definitely not all bad.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 020

The most notable thing about seedling 020A is that I almost didn't get to see the bloom; it's rare, but the Schlumbergeras do sometimes die of natural(-ish) causes, and I think 020A got overwatered and cold simultaneously, last year, causing a substantial branch to rot. Another branch came close to rotting but appears to have re-rooted itself over the summer.

It wouldn't have been much of a loss if it had died; the color is a little unusual (lighter than the normal orange), but the plant only produced one flower, and as I mentioned in the post for 077B Bad Reputation, I'm having a tough time trusting that any of the bloom colors are the real bloom color. Maybe it's unusual, and maybe it's not. Anyway. This is the only photo I got --

-- so we'd best get to the name options.

We have: Confidential Help, Feet Of Clay, Outrun The Bear, and Special Hardship, which I think are all pretty self-explanatory except maybe Outrun The Bear, which is a reference to a joke.¹

So I'll drop Confidential Help first, on the grounds that it makes less sense now than it did whenever I thought of it.²

And Outrun The Bear isn't nearly as funny now that I've ruined the joke for myself.

Special Hardship sort of works, referring to the rotted branches, but Feet Of Clay is an even better reference to a seedling that may have weak roots.³ Hell, the bloom is even (approximately) clay-colored. So: Feet Of Clay.

-

¹ Two campers are out in the woods doing campery things, and all of a sudden they see a bear in the distance. The bear sees them too, and starts coming toward them, and the first camper sits down, takes off his heavy hiking boots and puts on a pair of tennis shoes. "What are you doing changing shoes," says the second camper, "you're not going to outrun the bear." "I don't have to outrun the bear," answers the first camper. "I just have to outrun you."
And then the second camper pulls out a knife and slices the first camper in the calf, I guess, because that's kind of a dickish answer and clearly they must not get along that well. Also it's only logical, by the first camper's reasoning. Naturally the first camper strikes back, and so on back and forth until by the time the bear arrives they're both hobbled and bleeding, and the bear kills them both and then eats all the food they brought, which is just as well because they were clearly pretty shitty people.
Actually I added everything after "I just have to outrun you." The joke's always bothered me.
Though I think it bothers me even more after my addition: it feels like a metaphor for something.
² I suppose I just meant that the seedling needed help to get back on track again, and the help would have to be confidential so as not to embarrass it in front of the other seedlings. Sometimes the anthropomorphization gets away from me a bit.
³ Not to mention the "in psychotherapy" part of the Wikipedia article about "feet of clay," as psychotherapy ties neatly into the "confidential help" thing. Confidential help that the seedling needs because of its special hardship. This whole post is just a tiny ball of densely-knotted interconnections, innit?

Pretty picture: Coelogyne Jannine Banks 'Snow White'

It's maybe a little bit odd that there have only been 2 Coelogyne in PATSP history, and both of them happened this year.

Not odd as in mysterious beyond all human fathoming or anything. But it's weird enough to acknowledge.

Sort of a stereotypically orchidy flower, the sort of thing that should be on a shampoo bottle or something. It's fine, but it didn't photograph well, and it's not like my jaw dropped when I saw it either. Truthfully, I'm more impressed with the foliage. There are better photos of the flowers here and some much better photos here, if you're interested.

Coelogyne Jannine Banks is a primary hybrid (a hybrid of two species), which is a little bit interesting, maybe:

Coelogyne Jannine Banks = Coelogyne mooreana x Coelogyne flaccida (Ref.)

They're both white (though flaccida is sometimes more of a cream or tan); in my opinion Jannine Banks takes more after (and is aesthetically inferior to) mooreana, but if you say it resembles flaccida more, I'm not going to challenge you to a parking lot knife fight over it or anything.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 077 (again)

As seedlings go, well, the difference between 077A Grendel and 077B¹ is a lot more obvious in person than it is in the photos: Grendel is a clear, medium orange with no hint of red, and 077B is a reddish-orange. Which is an opportunity for me to make a Schlumbergera complaint that I haven't made yet.

Do you remember September, when I talked about how I was trying to figure out how many seedlings from each cross I needed to pot up in order to be assured that I'd see most of the color variation the cross was capable of producing? And I decided that there were 13 different color combinations represented among the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach seedlings? That not only went out the window this year, it went out the window, rolled down a steep hill, landed in a river, went over a waterfall, caught fire, and then exploded. Because not only were the offspring of the new crosses not really different from one another at all, a lot of the old seedlings decided this was the year to try out new color combinations, revisit weird colors that they hadn't done since their first bloom, or do the usual color but in a really extreme way. So things like this happened:

079A Yayoi Kusama, 2015-16 (top) and 2016-17 (bottom)
079A Yayoi Kusama had flirted with magenta margins previously, so it wasn't too much of a surprise to see them come back, but previously the magenta was mostly restricted to the lowest petals, usually only on the tips, and tended to fade as the bloom aged. This year's blooms were split about half-and-half between the two color combinations, and the magenta ones faded a little, but not as much as they did last year.

064A Rose Hoses, 2014-15 (top) 2015-16 (center), and 2016-17 (bottom)
064A Rose Hoses has been a pretty consistent orange / light pink in the past; sometimes the orange has been a little redder, sometimes the pink has been a little stronger, but I didn't see anything like this coming. If anything, that lowest photo understates the intensity of the color, especially on the blooms from late November.

074B Crone Island, 2015-16 (top) and 2016-17 (center and bottom)
074A Vroom and 074B Crone Island have been consistently inconsistent, which is to say that the colors don't really match up from one photo to the next (Vroom is generally red with a white tube, plus or minus some orange near the petal base, plus or minus some magenta near the petal tips; Crone Island is generally peach or orange with a pink or white tube), but they've been distinguishable from one another: Crone Island's the pastel one, Vroom is the darker one. The flower in the center photo above throws all that out the window, though. The branch it appeared on was tagged as Crone Island, but looks like Vroom. Could they be the same seedling? If so, how do I explain that they were distinct before this?

217A Blood Frenzy, 2015-16 (top) and 2016-17 (center and bottom)
217A Blood Frenzy has never been very consistently-colored, even last year. It produced a mix of magenta/red/orange/white, red/orange/white, and red/white both years.

The point of bringing this up is that although 077A Grendel has previously always been a nice clear orange / white, and although 077B has so far been red-orange / pink or orange-red / pink, I'm not sure that 077B is a separate seedling. And not only that, but it all sort of makes a mockery of the idea that I had 13 different color combinations. I saw 13 differently-colored flowers, maybe, but if every seedling can bloom three different ways, then maybe I've got a lot more duplicated seedlings here than I thought. Almost makes a person appreciate the Anthuriums.²

Anyway. 077B, if there is a 077B, is redder than it looks in these photos. Or at least it is sometimes.

My name options for a lot of the Schlumbergera seedlings reflect my state of mind when I was coming up with them, which is how we get names like Deimos to consider for 211A Bruce Lee. 077B was the first new seedling to bloom this year, and was first photographed on 15 November, so . . . you can probably guess where this is going.

Our name options today are: Accelerationist, Bad Reputation, Expletive Deleted, and Manocide Vagenda.

Accelerationism is the political strategy of voting to deliberately making things worse, so as to blow up the system and build something way better in the future, after the present crappy system has completely collapsed under the weight of the terrible people you voted for on purpose to make everything worse. And yes, this is actually an argument people were making in 2016. (I feel like I also remember it from 2004.) Don't know how many people actually voted accordingly. And although it is a very good way of making things worse in the short term, it is a very bad way to make things better in the long term, as we are about to learn. So I think I can throw out Accelerationist immediately.

Manocide Vagenda is memorable, and amuses me, though, again, there are people who actually think that misandry is a thing, and the reason to keep women out of power is because they all hate men and will kill them in droves if permitted the chance.³ And a sign was put up in Maine to this effect, in the impossibly distant time known as "August 2016," a sign which was so over the top awful that (for me) it sort of wrapped all the way around and became adorable. But it's obviously a terrible name for a seedling, in almost every way you could evaluate seedling names.

So Expletive Deleted or Bad Reputation, is our choice.

I feel like Expletive Deleted should maybe be held for a future seedling, on the grounds that I should pace myself a bit: if I'm already doing censored swearing in 2016-17, surely the names will sound [WARNING: link is not even a little bit safe for work -->] like an episode of Deadwood by the 2020-21 season.⁴

Bad Reputation gets points for being unrelated to the election, and it's never a bad time to think about Joan Jett or Freaks and Geeks, but the seedling doesn't have a bad reputation so I'm not sure it makes sense. Though I suppose the seedling didn't inspire cursing either. And we're sort of out of other options.

So I'll go with Bad Reputation.

-

¹ And yes, I considered skipping the whole process and calling 077B Beowulf. I'm not sure that would have been a bad idea, but it seemed a little too neat.
² Almost.
³ *COUGHCOUGHCOUGHprojectionCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH*
⁴ Should the gods be so merciful and/or cruel as to let 2020 happen.
Also Deadwood is a lot better and funnier than that makes it sound. I've been rewatching it lately on Amazon, and it's fucking delightful. Don't let the cursing or the fact that it's a western put you off. Unless you really, really hate cursing, in which case I'm going to look at you with a puzzled / concerned expression on my face until you explain yourself.