Pretty picture: Oncidium Tiger Brew 'Pacific Holiday'

I'm not normally a big Oncidium Alliance guy, but I like this kind of thing.

It was probably my second-favorite orchid at the show, even.¹ I really like the big flowers, and the patterning on them. (Yellow/brown isn't my favorite color combination; I'd rather have seen just about any other color scheme. But you get to photograph the orchids they have, not the orchids you want.)

Oncidium Tiger Brew = Oncidium Memoria Rudolf Pabst x Oncidium Tiger Hambühren (Ref.)

Previously, we've seen a half-sibling (Odontocidium (now Oncidium) Tiger Crow 'Golden Girl,' related via Oncidium Tiger Hambühren).

There is also Wilsonara (now Oncidium) Sheila Anne,² which is Onc.Tiger Crow x Onc. Wearside Pattern. I spent a really long time staring at the relationships here and wound up not quite being able to figure it out, but I think Sheila Anne is the half-niece of Tiger Brew, or something along those lines.³

This orchid, and the other two previous orchids, all look pretty similar anyway. Tiger Crow is yellower, and lacks the brown outline around the tepals that Tiger Brew has, and Sheila Anne has large blotches of brown where the other two have a number of smaller spots, but even if you didn't know they were related, you'd probably suspect they were related.

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¹ The actual favorite being Oncostele Midnight Miracles, which was, strangely enough, also an Oncidium Alliance orchid. Maybe I like them better than I think I do?
² Spelled as "Sheila Ann" in the blog post, because apparently I still trusted the tagging to be accurate in 2011.
³ Not that concepts like "sibling" and "cousin" have a terribly distinct meaning anymore, once you're talking about hybrids of hybrids of hybrids, with everything so inbred and all. But orchid genealogy amuses me, so:
• Oncidium Tiger Brew = Oncidium Memoria Rudolf Pabst x Oncidium Tiger Hambühren,
• Oncidium Tiger Crow = Oncidium Crowborough x Oncidium Tiger Hambühren,
• Oncidium Sheila Anne = Oncidium Tiger Crow x Oncidium Wearside Pattern.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 281

Here's another Schlumbergera seedling that only managed to get three name finalists. Unlike 220A Lucille Ball, where one of the names was thrown out, 281A never had four -- I felt like the three I came up with were all strong enough that they would be impossible to choose between as it was, without having to add a fourth.

Oh, and I guess I should note for the record that 281A is a sibling of 283A Migaloo; the seed parent was the NOID white, and I feel like there's a pretty strong case to make for the NOID magenta being the pollen parent, because . . . well, just look at it.

Anyway. The nominees: Bite Tongue Deep Breath, No Bad Vibez, and Sojourner Truth.

Bite Tongue Deep Breath is, allegedly, what is being repeated in the Clams Casino song "I'm God," previously linked in the post with all the music from a while back. Though because of how indistinct the words are in the mix, some sites say "bite tongue deep breathS" or even "bite down deep breaths." I hear "tongue" and singular "breath," and don't especially care what the actual lyrics are. The point is that I've been saying "bite tongue, deep breath" to myself a lot lately. So why not a seedling name?

No Bad Vibez is also music-related: it's the title of a Rich White Ladies song which was linked in the 21 January post. It also got a post of its own last July.¹

And Soujourner Truth is the historical figure, a name I'd heard a lot without ever being clear on exactly who she was or what she'd done. Part of this may be that her life is difficult to summarize, but this site covers the high points. Wikipedia and www.sojournertruth.com/ go into more detail (though the latter link wanders off into the weeds about halfway down the page, the first half is good). Wikipedia is also interesting on the subject of her most famous speech, known as Ain't I a Woman?.²

So. Bite Tongue Deep Breath can go first; it's not necessarily bad, but it is long, and it doesn't make a lot of sense out of context, so this is a pretty easy decision. (Sometimes not making sense out of context makes me like a name better, but not in this case.)

The choice between No Bad Vibez and Sojourner Truth, on the other hand, is very difficult. Truth is amazing, seriously, and well worthy of being honored. Which is why she's already got a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue, a library, an interstate, a few paintings, a postage stamp, a rover on the surface of Mars, an asteroid (Truth 249521), and (soon) a $10 bill. Among other things. A Schlumbergera seedling feels tiny and unnecessary in comparison.

No Bad Vibez, on the other hand, isn't inherently worthy of honor -- I do like the song, a lot, but I'm not going to claim that it's one of history's greatest pop songs or anything. It does have an interesting ambiguity of phrasing, though. Is it like "no right turn on red," i.e., "bad vibez are prohibited?" Or is it more like "there are no bad vibez present in this location," like "no GMOs?" The song's clearly talking about prohibition, but if you saw the plant for sale and didn't know about the song, you might read it as absence. And who wouldn't want a plant that's free of negativity?

So which argument is the more compelling one? Which name looks more like the plant before us here?

I had to think about this question for several days, and even then, I wasn't able to settle on one or the other. It came down to a literal coin-toss, and No Bad Vibez won. I wasn't unhappy that it won, which I suppose means it's the one I wanted. I imagine we'll be seeing Soujourner Truth again.

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¹ Well, it had to share with an orchid, Amorphophallus, and politics. But it was the only music video.
² Interesting mostly for the ways in which it was distorted. The original speech was given in 1851, and although newspapers reported on it at the time, neither provided a full transcription. The first transcription was published about a month after the speech, by someone who was present, and doesn't include the question "Ain't I a woman?"
Then, twelve years after the speech was given, a new version was published by Frances Dana Barker Gage, which has become the canonical version, but Gage also quotes Truth as having a lot of speech mannerisms like those of southern slaves (which Truth had never been; she grew up speaking only Dutch until the age of nine, and was reportedly quite proud of her diction). So we go from the 1851 version, which begins:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. [sic] I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?

to Gage's 1863 version, which starts

"Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter. I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all dis here talkin' 'bout?"

So, I mean, what in the fucking fuck, Frances Dana Barker Gage? Were you even there? (Wikipedia says she was: "[Gage] was an activist in the temperance, anti-slavery, and woman's-rights movements, and in 1851 presided over a woman's-rights convention in Akron, Ohio, where her opening speech introducing Sojourner Truth attracted much attention. Twelve years later, in 1863, Gage recorded her recollection of Truth's speech, 'Ain't I a Woman?.' Gage's version notably differs from 1851 accounts,[6] lengthening the speech, adding the oft-repeated 'ain't I a woman' refrain,[7] and rendering it in a minstrel-like imitation of the speech of Southern slaves - speech patterns which Truth, having grown up in New York speaking Dutch, did not possess." So at this point one can only make a Jim Halpert face at the camera

Source: jimhalpertfaces.tumblr.com
and continue.)
The upshot being that, aside from a few points where the accounts overlap, we don't actually know what Sojourner Truth said in Sojourner Truth's most famous and widely-quoted speech. I find this kind of shocking, myself, though I bet Truth wouldn't be surprised.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Sumurun 'Pearl' (?)

This was tagged Paphiopedilum Sumurum, but the International Orchid Registry doesn't have a plant by that name, and I think we all know how seriously to take orchid tags by now. The IOR does know of a Sumurun, though, which is what I'm assuming this is, and there's sort of confirmation at the Eastern Iowa Orchid Society newsletter from March 2014, which shows a very similar-looking flower on page 5, identified as Sumurun 'Pearl,' presumably the same specimen.

Further confirmation: among many other very interesting plants photographed at the Montreal Botanical Garden,¹ this page includes a Sumurun 'Boholt' that resembles this flower, which is the best I could do for confirmation.

Paphiopedilum Sumurun = Paphiopedilum Boltonii x Paphiopedilum Christopher (Ref.)

I was unable to find photos of either parent, when I looked back in March. I did find a half-sibling (on the Boltonii side) that is also mostly white with some faint spotting, though I apparently didn't save the link so I can't show it to you.

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¹ (In particular, I really like that Lycaste schilleriana 'Our Tropics Daiquiri.')

Schlumbergera seedling no. 220

Nothing particularly interesting about seedling 220. This one actually is a 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach seedling, as opposed to some of the recent ones that merely resembled the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach seedlings. It's not a new color, it doesn't do anything unusually well or poorly. It's just kinda there.

The name nominees are: Beaker, Lucille Ball, and Summer In Winter.¹

Beaker, obviously, is the Muppet, whose orange hair and pink skin is an approximate match for the orange/pink color combination of the seedling. It's a better color match than Lucille Ball is, though being a real person counts in Lucille Ball's favor. It's also possible that Beaker could run afoul of trademarks or something, as Disney owns the Muppets and is known to be on something of a hair trigger when it comes to suing people.²

Summer In Winter is just a reference to the color (orange, warm, sunny, summerish, plus white/snow/winter) and bloom season (late fall / early winter).

This choice isn't much of a choice, unfortunately. Summer In Winter sounded nice when I thought of it, but I don't like it at all now, for reasons which are difficult to explain but more or less amount to, I feel like it's trying too hard to be pleasant.³ And I wound up convincing myself that Beaker is a bad idea, and Mr. Beaker doesn't change it enough. Which leaves, anticlimactically, Lucille Ball.

Not that I don't like Lucy. I love Lucy (it says so right in the title of her show!). Like with Dusty Springfield, I find Ball admirable and deserving of respect, but just don't feel that much of an emotional connection with her. These things will happen sometimes, I guess.

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¹ A fourth nominee was removed from consideration when pre-writing internet searches revealed that, despite seeming perfectly innocent, it had unfortunate fascist / Nazi-Germany connections. In the past, I might have been willing to go along with it, in a sort of well I'll just fucking make it mean what I want it to mean and besides that's a pretty loose and non-obvious connection so it's not like people will know way, but times are strange. And there are so many possible seedling names that it's not that big of a deal to lose one.
Unfortunately, I found out about this too late in the blogging/naming process to come up with a fourth option.
² I did have, probably still have, an actual laboratory beaker that my lab partner and I had used in high school chemistry. I don't remember what was written on it, but I remember we wrote something on it in orange china marker and we found this so amusing that I asked the teacher if I could keep the beaker and she said yes. Since the flower's pink is a pretty weak pink, there could be a case made for naming the seedling "Beaker" in honor of the chemistry lab beaker (actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure what we wrote on it was "Mr. Beaker," and it was the beaker's own name, not a Muppets reference), rather than the Muppet. Would that hold up in court?
It'd help if I could locate Mr. Beaker, I suppose. And I'm not positive that Mr. Beaker didn't get the china marker washed off of him at some point.
³ (Also, I would much rather see more winter in my summers than summer in my winters. Winters are too summery already.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 192

Another seedling from the NOID magenta that looks like it could have been a 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach cross. Not unpleasant at all, but also not new.

The name finalists are: Come At Me Bro, Deer Devil, Ecstatica, and Oney Judge.

Come At Me Bro doesn't really have any secondary meaning; the color on this seedling is just very intense and emphatic, and it seemed like a good name.

Deer Devil was previously considered for seedling 106A Jaws of Elmo, based on a photo gathered through TinEye. I noted back then that Deer Devil was sort of a problematic name because people get weird about mentioning the devil, and this is still true, but it feels like the name would suit the seedling, so I'm at least going to think about it.

I don't know where Ecstatica came from.

Oney Judge is a historical figure, a slave of George and Martha Washington (Judge was Martha's personal servant) who escaped to New Hampshire in 1796 and lived thereafter as a fugitive. The story is more interesting and complicated than that,¹ and if you're at all interested you should read some of the links in that footnote, but if you're not then just know that Oney Judge was awesome and totally worthy of a seedling.

So okay. Ecstatica doesn't feel like a terrible choice, though there are a couple different ways to look at it and only one of them works. If you take it to mean that the flower looks like ecstasy² would look, if ecstasy were converted to flower form, it's fine. On the other hand, if you read it as promising to induce ecstasy, well, that's harder to deliver. Also I think I was maybe influenced by the resemblance of the word to "Elastica." Dumb reasons to drop a name, but by the time I get the options narrowed down to four finalists that could all work, the reasons for rejecting a name are always kind of stupid.

The remaining three names make for a difficult choice. I mean, yes, Deer Devil is problematic because of religious sensibilities or whatever, but I still think it's a neat mental image. Left to my own devices for a while, I could probably even spin those two words into a full cervid theology. It's fun to think about. And while I'm not crazy about the brotasticness of Come At Me Bro, those are some very come-at-me-bro colors. It really fits, even if I suspect I'd get tired of it eventually.

In the end, though, it kinda has to be Oney Judge, not just because she's fun to learn about, but because she's a role model. And my goodness do I ever need role models these days.^{3, 4}

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¹ In particular, her motivation for leaving in the first place appears to have been only partly because she wanted to be free, and not especially because she disliked the Washingtons (though the Washingtons weren't angels here; there was a law in Pennsylvania that if someone who wasn't officially a resident of Pennsylvania brought slaves into the state, the slaves would automatically be freed after six months. There was a specific exemption for slaves of members of Congress, but not for slaves of the President. So, every six months, the Washingtons would go back to Mount Vernon for a few days, or to New Jersey for an overnight trips, bringing servants with them, and thereby managed to reset the clock. Pennsylvania specifically prohibited the practice of relocating slaves to prevent them from being freed, so the Washingtons were breaking the law by doing this; I don't know why they were able to get away with it for sure, though I imagine being the President helped. Being President makes it easy to get away with a lot of things. *sigh*).
The timing of Judge's escape was mostly determined, as I understand it, by Judge learning that Martha Washington planned to give her to her granddaughter (Elizabeth Custis) as a wedding present. And Custis was an asshole. So.
There's a lot of interesting background stuff about Oney Judge on line, at Wikipedia (and its associated Talk page), slacktivist (which is probably where I first heard of Judge), and todayifoundout.com, which has a pretty detailed but readable account of Judge's life.
² (the subjective sensation, not the illegal drug)
³ Even in a 13-month period with an unusually prominent number of celebrity deaths, Mary Tyler Moore's death on 25 January hit me hard. For reasons that readers who have been around since 2011 will understand better than readers who haven't. And it's not like things were going great before MTM died.
⁴ Which is possibly the reason why, although I just rejected Dusty Springfield as a name, on the grounds that I've been naming things after people a lot, I don't feel bad about rejecting Dusty and choosing Oney. For all the great things about Dusty Springfield, I don't necessarily see her as someone to emulate.
I mean, she's not not a hero either, and if you do look up to Springfield then more power to you. I just don't connect with her in that way.
When I look at the name finalists I have lined up for future seedlings, there are a lot of specific famous people on that list. I've been trying to keep it to just one person per seedling, so as to avoid having to choose between awesome person #1 and equally awesome person #2, but I don't want every seedling for the rest of the season to be honoring a specific real-life person, and there are a lot of person-name nominees. (220A, 281A, 058C, 176A, 101A, 062A, 092B, 089B, 070A, 181A, 244A, 128A, 011A, and 042A. Plus fictional honorees for 096A, 193A, and 215A.)

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Hokulea

Another Epidendrum of the type I don't like. Though at least the ID is fairly solid this time, unlike the last one.

Epidendrum Hokulea = Epidendrum Joseph Lii x Epidendrum cinnabarinum (Ref.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 178

I think seedling 178 was the first seedling of the NOID magenta to bloom, though the second to get a blog post. Not that you could tell it's from the NOID magenta by looking at it: it looks like all the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach offspring that we're all pretty tired of by now. That said, it isn't bad, just treading some pretty well-trod ground. So let's just get to the naming.

The four candidates I cam up with this time were: Dusty Springfield, Lulu's Night Off, Saltwater Taffy, and What About The Love.

Dusty Springfield is, of course, the singer/producer. Her name was previously considered for seedlings 106A and 033A, but was rejected in favor of Jaws of Elmo and Clueless, respectively.¹ Perhaps the third time will be the charm.

Lulu's Night Off is one of the suggestions I've taken from my big list of random word combinations.² I don't know who Lulu is, I don't know where she works or what happened on her night off that would be worth commemorating in a seedling, but I sort of like it that way. Make up your own story of Lulu's night off and leave it in the comments.

I don't see much Saltwater Taffy around, though the Menards in Iowa City always seems to have some somewhere. I like it, and the colors often overlap Schlumbergera blooms, which are good enough reasons to consider it for a seedling name. I could see these colors showing up in orange or strawberry taffy.

And finally, What About The Love, after Amy Grant's song of the same name,³ which was one of the songs I linked to a while back, and which I like mostly as a reminder that, whatever it's become recently, it wasn't that long ago that Christianity was about things besides abortion, gays, confederate flags, and killing the infidels.⁴

Kind of a depressing reminder, granted, since it also reminds me that that's not really the public face of Christianity anymore. And even in the past, loving one's neighbors was sort of . . . unevenly applied, let's say. But what it was once, in small pockets, it could be again, more universally. In theory. It's enough to hang a hope on.

So. I guess What About The Love is a bit too depressing, in that context. Also it's the longest option of the four, which counts slightly against it. So I'll let it go. And although I like Dusty Springfield (more so now that I've just watched a video for "Son of a Preacher Man"), both times this season that I've included a real-life person in the name candidates, I've gone with the person.⁵ Nothing wrong with that, but it feels a little predictable, and I'm also leaning pretty hard toward people for some of the yet-to-be-decided seedling names. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I don't want them all to be named after people. So I'm going to drop Dusty for a third time. Sorry, Dusty.

So we're left with Lulu's Night Off and Saltwater Taffy. Of the two, I think I like Lulu's Night Off better, specifically because it's both more specific (refers to one particular event) and more open-ended (free to imagine any particular event). Plus having a night off is generally seen as a good, happy thing. Therefore: 178A Lulu's Night Off.

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¹ Jaws of Elmo was definitely the right decision. I'm less confident about Clueless.
² Which is where a lot of the names have been coming from this year, though it's not always obvious because it turns out that randomly throwing words together generates the sorts of things people already say and ideas people already have, a surprising amount of the time. Like 020A Feet Of Clay was a random-word idea, and I'm pretty sure 077B Bad Reputation was as well.
Sometimes the random word combinations generate appealingly strange mental images too, which I've been collecting in a separate list. Some of them:
Jabberwocky Musical (which has, of course, happened already) • Uterus Gun • Expanded Milk (presumably the opposite of condensed milk) • Kitten Chapel • Bottle-Blonde Baby (I bet it's happened) • Moondial (as compared to a sundial) • Clogged Bagpipes (bagpipes do get things in them from time to time, sometimes with fatal consequences, even) • Tiara Repairman • etc.
³ It was written by Janis "At Seventeen" Ian, not Amy Grant, but it was written specifically for Grant to perform, and Grant's version is the one I'm most familiar with, so.
⁴ Well. I suppose infidel-killing has been a running theme for quite a while. But the others are new.
And yes, one could certainly argue that that's not what it means even now, that it's still about feeding the hungry, sheltering the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison, that it's still something that you could call "good news" with a straight face.
Yessir, one could definitely argue that.
But I wouldn't.
⁵ (211A Bruce Lee and 203A Dolly Parton)

Pretty picture: Lycamerlycaste Jean Tolliday Kendolie

This looks a lot like the year's other Lycaste and Lycamerlycaste specimens. It's possible that I shouldn't have taken so many photos of them.

I mean, not that they're not nice and everything. There's just not a lot of variety.

This is the plant I described back in August as having "two flowers of almost exactly the same size, facing almost exactly the same direction," with the result looking "like I took a picture of one and then photoshopped it using the clone tool." Which is an exaggeration, but not by a hell of a lot:

I would also like to mention that the shape of the flowers in the above photo reminds me of acetylacetone,

a chemical I have strong, pleasant personal feelings about (because I am the sort of person who has feelings about specific chemicals sometimes¹).

I should note that the plant was tagged as Lycaste at the show, but the International Orchid Registry has one of the parents as a Lycamerlycaste.² And as goes the IOR, so goes my nation.

Lycamerlycaste Jean Tolliday Kendolie = Lycaste Shonan Harmony x Lycamerlycaste Geyser Gold (Ref.)

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¹ Also in the "strong positive feelings" department: benzaldehyde, crown ethers, isopentyl acetate, eugenol, and, weirdly, thalidomide, which I like not for causing birth defects but because the shape of the molecule is strangely and inexplicably pleasing to me. So many molecules, especially pharmaceuticals, have their atoms arranged in an ugly way.
² Lycamerlycaste is the nothogenus for crosses between Lycaste species and Sudamerlycaste species. The genus Sudamerlycaste was split off of Lycaste in 2002, says Wikipedia.