Some excerpts from the comment thread at FailBlog:
天花灯 means “ceiling light”
the last character, 灯 = “light”,
the second two together, 花灯 = “lantern”,
and the first one 天 = “overhead”… but, the first two by themselves, 天花 = “smallpox” (in Chinese)
and
天 = “heaven” and by extension things like “overhead”.leading to this thought:
花 = “flower”
Addendum - after some Googling, I found this: "...the Chinese do not use one water for a family bath as do the Japanese, and suffer from less trachoma and skin diseases. Faces, pitted by small- pox, which they call " Heavenly Flowers," are constantly met...."I don’t know the source for “heaven flower.” Just speculating, I wonder about a connection with the “flower-like” pox marks and “fate” (”mandate of heaven”) — since, once people get smallpox, there isn’t much treatment for it.
Certainly not fail, though, is the fact that it was the Chinese who discovered medical inoculation — precisely for dealing with smallpox. Chinese physicians were performing effective preventative inoculations a thousand years ago, a number of centuries before the practice came to Europe (by way of the Turks, who had learned it from the Chinese).
So there’s some, ah, light on the subject.