Why "muffin"?

It's a dumb story. Really, it is. But everyone wants to know. So here's the official version.

When we were in high school (N.B.: this sets the story in the late 1980s), my beloved friend Lisa Cozza decided one day that the two of us ought to have really obnoxious pet names for each other, for the express purpose of annoying her parents. So, when I would walk in the back door of her house, I would call out adoringly, "BUTTERCUP?", and she would shriek down the stairs, "MUFFIN!"

The novelty soon wore off this, but the names stuck.

When I got to college, our campus radio station, WBRS, had a call-in talk show known as "Quality Time," where all the regular callers used nicknames on the air. I've never had much of a nickname really (you can't do a whole lot with "Erica," although my dad used to and still occasionally does call me "peanut"). So, thinking this was really cool, I started calling in as "Muffin."

Our junior year of college, my equally beloved friend Cos bestowed this World account on me for my 19th birthday (N.B.: this means I have in fact been online since 1991). So what did I pick for my username? Uh-huh.

I swear, if I had known I would still be explaining it ten years later, I might have thought better of it....

NEW -- Muffin Links! Excluding all the porn sites.

• Muffin Films: Amazingly cute little Flash animations (by, as it turns out, the creator of Making Fiends and Big Bunny) that are all about -- you guessed it -- muffins! A friend stumbled on this and, for some odd reason, thought of me. Not only did I have to share... I bought the t-shirt.
• What the Muffins?: A new Web sitcom. You can download the episodes or just read the pilot script. I'd swear I must have dated know these guys, except I think they're on the West Coast.
• Muffin Buttons: ... well, those are mine, of course.
• The Muffin the Vampire Baker sequence in the Sluggy Freelance comic strip.
• The Muffin Monster: Guaranteed, it's not what you think!
• The Muffins: a prog-rock band.
• Muffins.com is actually about muffins. Muffins.org is the site of a Brooklyn-based pet adoption service.
• My own favorite muffins locally come from Carberry's.

Q: So... what kind of muffin are you? (heh heh, heh heh, heh)
A: Chocolate chip.

Q: But what's up with "std.com"? (heh heh, heh heh, heh)
A: In fact, it stands for "Software Tool & Die," the name of the company in Brookline, Massachusetts, that owns the machine (and hence the Internet service) on which I have this account. "The World" is the name of the machine, inside the "std" domain. (I went looking for a layperson-friendly explanation of hierarchical naming conventions on the Internet, but haven't found much; suggestions are welcomed. Meanwhile, suffice it to say that this domain name long predates the rise of "dot-com" in the public consciousness. >:-) The company seems to be deprecating "world.std.com" in favor of "theworld.com" nowadays, anyway.

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