The second bud has been blooming for awhile, so it's time to post the final pics. The second bud did turn itself around on its own and opened perfectly normally with a lovely bloom.
Dr. Toshinori Tanaka from Japan has a rather entertaining Website with the content of orchid articles he feels are particularly interesting. I e-mailed him on an article he had posted from the Orchid Review about this same topic: http://www.orchid.or.jp/orchid/peopl...WS/ennew8.html
(I actually e-mailed him because the link was broken, which he remedied.) But he said uni-florals blooming multiple flowers do happen, and it's a genetic glitch where a unifloral paph thinks it can leap tall buildings. (Well, not quite his words...)
After reading the article I took another look at my plant's structure and realized a few things (that I thought were pretty cool.)
So my uni-floral guy knows in his deep genetic subconscious that he has the potential to "get up" so to speak, another flower. And he decides to go for it... Trouble is, as a uni-floral, he doesn't have the genetic blueprint for how multi-floral buds are produced. That is, usually a long infloresence with short stemmed flowers coming off, fairly close to one another. My guy only knows how to produce a single flower off his regular infloresence.
But he really wants to go for the gold (note the timely metaphor there), so he makes the best due he can. He produces a spike of the usual length and sticks a bud on that. Then he adds to that another spike of the usual length and sticks a bud on that. The 2nd bud starts the wrong way up, but he sorts it out eventually. He has no idea that his idea of multi-floral spike length isn't like that in the wild.
The funkiest part of the whole story is...his spikes always come out of a leaf axil. So he goes to the trouble of sticking a leaf atop the first spike, so that his second spike can come out of a leaf axil! All of a sudden the funky leaf made perfect sense!
I was impressed!
Julie