Schlumbergera seedling no. 103 (again)

103B is sort of good news / bad news, in that I like the color a lot (Not orange! It's a Valentine's Day miracle!), but it's only produced one bloom so far, so I don't have much of a sense of its actual quality.¹

Not only does it have very good coloration for a Valentine's Day post, the colors seemed to prompt TinEye to come up with a more Valentine's-friendly set of names than one would otherwise expect. Out of nine options on the short list, five are love-and-romance themed, with a sixth that isn't really about love or romance but is certainly love-and-romance friendly. The remaining three names are probably at a disadvantage, but who knows. Let's see what happens.²

The nine options, in alphabetical order, are:

• David Lynch, which, okay, not romantic at all, but it made me laugh to see it in the results, and it actually showed up twice in TinEye, so it's certainly trying really hard. And there's an argument to be made for certain parts of certain Lynch films being romantic to some degree or another. I mean, it's not a good argument. But a person could still try. Mulholland Drive, at least. Maybe. A little. In places.

• Go Radish Go is a combination of Radish, which is actually super color-appropriate but has the naming-a-plant-for-a-plant problem, and
Go Sinner Go. I liked the "Go _______ Go" idea, but not with "sinner" in the blank. Therefore, Go Radish Go. It's dumb, but I like the way it sounds.

• Laser is only barely appropriate, but red is a common enough color for lasers to be, so.

• The first of the actual love/romance options is Make-Out City, which has been considered previously.³ I liked it well enough to put it on the emergency list, and this was the only emergency-list option that seemed reasonable for this seedling.

• Must Be Love is sort of obviously a Valentine's Day kind of name, though one wouldn't say the photo is particularly romantic.

• Pomme D'Amour is, if I understand correctly, the French name for the English "candy apple," and translates literally as "love apple."⁴

• Remote Kisses is actually referencing Hershey's kisses, in the photo, but there are a lot of ways one could interpret the name: someone being kissed by a remote control, someone kissing someone else while thinking about some other thing entirely, a couple sharing a passionate kiss in some jungle / desert / tundra / boat far from civilization, etc. Whether the ambiguity makes me like it more or less, I'm not sure, but it's at least one of the more complicated options.

• Valentine's Day is super obvious, but hey, TinEye gave it to me, and I could hardly leave it off the list.

• And then finally Zooey Deschanel (twice), who isn't maybe particularly known for love and romance and whatever but is, at the very least, love-and-romance-friendly. Plus I really like "New Girl," and she seems pretty unlikely to become horrible.

So all right. I think I'll drop Zooey Deschanel first. Though she seems unlikely to become horrible, that's no guarantee of anything. I mean, I can think of at least five celebrities who once seemed fine but turned out to be awful in surprising ways.⁵ And she's still young enough to change plenty.

And Laser is a little plain. I mean, it could work, but it doesn't excite me at all. Probably needs a second word.

Valentine's Day is fine except for implying blooms on Valentine's Day. Which is pretty early, for spring blooming, and I don't want someone to expect something that the seedling can't deliver.

Go Radish Go is perhaps too silly.

As tickled as I am by the idea of David Lynch, and as relatively safe as I think he is as an honoree compared to other celebrities (certainly you can read a lot of awful stuff into his movies if you're determined to do so, but I don't think that depicting something on a screen is the same as endorsing it. And whatever his movies might be like, I feel like we probably know as much about his personal inner horribleness as we're ever going to learn, and he's not so bad.), I'm not ready to name a seedling after him yet. Maybe eventually, but not today.

Which leaves me with four love-and-romance names: Make-Out City, Must Be Love, Pomme D'Amour, and Remote Kisses.

My brain seems to want to interpret Remote Kisses to mean someone kissing another person while distracted or preoccupied with something else. I know there are other interpretations, but that's the one that comes to mind first, and it's kind of a downer. Which probably says more about me than it does about the name, but in any case I can't shake the impression, so I'll drop that one.

Make-Out City seems a little crass, compared to the other two. I don't necessarily have a problem with crass, but considering the occasion, it might be nice to have a name that sounds a little sweeter.

And given the choice between Pomme D'Amour and Must Be Love, well, I could only pronounce the latter with any confidence, ever. So it must be Must Be Love.

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¹ (The other red/pink Schlumbergeras -- 054A "Helpful Gesture," 074A "Vroom," 078A "Art Party," and 208A [name TBD] -- haven't produced many blooms either; I think this is coincidental, not related to them all being red/pinks, but it's a little worrisome all the same.)
² I really do almost always figure these out as I write the post. You can tell by the way the posts meander, backtrack, repeat themselves, and occasionally fail to select a name.
³ (for 056A Demons Begone and 111A Morning Sun)
⁴ And the Thing I Learned from writing this particular seedling-naming post is that caramel apples are not the same thing as candy apples. All these years, I've thought "candy-apple red" was a weird color description, because the only sugar/apple combination I was familiar with is caramel apples, and caramel is brown and not red. But candy apples are a totally separate phenomenon. And having now seen some photos, "candy-apple red" makes a lot more sense.
In retrospect, it should probably have been obvious that caramel apples were not candy apples. But that's why it's fun to learn: a tiny sliver of the world that didn't make sense to me before makes sense to me now.
⁵ I won't name them specifically, because it sucks to find out that someone you liked and related to -- even if you only knew the characters they played and not the actual person -- is awful. I mean, do you really want to know?