Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Schlumbergera seedling no. 271

This one's simultaneously boring and interesting. The boring part is the color,

and the interesting part is its ancestry. 271A is the first seedling from Schlumbergera x buckleyi to complete a bloom. Which is somewhat evident from the shape of the flowers,

if you compare it to buckleyi itself.

Both flowers are more or less actinomorphic, similar to 202A Joan Didion, though more so: Joan did eventually develop a sort of weak bilateral symmetry.


271A is both the first seedling from x buckleyi to bloom, and the only seedling from x buckleyi to bloom; two others formed blooms this year, but those apparently inherited buckleyi's tendency to drop buds if conditions weren't perfect.

Our name finalists: Chestburster, Hannie Schaft, Not Here To Make Friends, Svarog.

Chestburster is a reference to the Alien series of movies, specifically [SERIOUS SPOILERS for a 38-year-old movie] this scene from Alien. Not sure why it seems appropriate in this case; maybe it's best if we don't think too hard about it.

Hannie Schaft was a Dutch resistance fighter during World War II; there's a pretty bare-bones description of her life at Wikipedia. She's apparently pretty famous already, but I wasn't familiar with her until I ran across this article about Freddie Oversteegen, who was also involved with the Dutch resistance as a teenager. Schaft was known as "the girl with the red hair," and even though I'm pretty sure her hair wasn't as intensely orange-red as this flower, I figure it's as close as I'm likely to get, so.

Not Here To Make Friends is the reality show line. Again, I don't know why it feels appropriate for this seedling. I'm apparently in a hostile, fighty mood or something.

And Svarog is the Slavic fire / blacksmithing deity, previously considered for 056A Demons Begone, 072A Chell, and 180A Miss Emma.

These are mostly terrible (though you should have seen the ones I threw away!), but these are the choices. So.

Chestburster's got to go. It's not the color of the . . . character? . . . from Alien, or the shape. Makes no sense.1

The remaining three are all sort of equally unappealing to me. Worried I'm overdoing it with the WWII references lately, Svarog's been rejected multiple times already, and I don't even like reality TV shows (except the couple of them that I like).2

Still have to name it something, though, so I went into Excel and picked a random number between 1 and 3,3 and it returned 2, so I'll call this one 271A Not Here To Make Friends. Not thrilled about it, but I wasn't going to be thrilled with any of them, so I guess it's fine.


1 I think "burst" made sense because of the shape of the flower, and then "chestburster" popped into my head so I ran with it. Also I love Alien.
2 I'm even off RuPaul's Drag Race lately, for reasons too numerous and complicated to get into, but what finally got me to stop watching was when, two seasons ago, LOGO decided that it wasn't enough ask me to load the shittiest, most ad-encrusted, impossible-to-load, and frequently just plain broken website I've ever seen in order to watch RPDR, they were also only going to make it possible for me to watch the show if we also had a cable subscription. Our local cable company doesn't even carry LOGO, so I don't know what this was supposed to accomplish for them. No doubt there are places one could go to illegally download copies of the episodes regardless, but I was mad at LOGO, and sort of mad at Ru, and it seemed like the simplest thing to do would be to just wash my hands of the whole show.
On the other hand, we've started watching The Great British Baking Show on Netflix, and I kind of love it. U.S. Netflix skips the first three seasons, so we started watching with season 4, so it's possible that it's just an unusually nice and pleasant season, but the absence of "I'm not here to make friends"-type comments has been fucking delightful. The cooking stuff is interesting sometimes, but I watch for the emotional tone of the show more than anything else. Everybody seems pretty happy to be there, the contestants assist one another occasionally without appearing to make a big deal about it, everyone seems sad when someone gets eliminated, it's, like, just a bunch of people who like to do a thing getting together and doing the thing.
And I think that's all the reality TV I like, as Supernanny is no longer airing. (And Supernanny was starting to get old by the time I quit watching it, to be honest.)


Pattock said...

Not Tim The weirdest but most moving for me. 50 years old this year. I'm still a slightly hopeful hippie.

or Jeff? I don't know his stuff well enough to have a favourite and Leonard Cohen did Hallelujah much better.

It would save on the typing.

Paul said...

Lovely red color