Posted by Sari
Most excellent author and translator J. Pekka Mäkelä threw a meme at us asking why the blog is called "Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner".
In the last years of the last millenium Jukka and I played around with an idea of a web journal of sorts, something that would have essays and reviews and whatnot, but never got around doing anything about it. What made us take the leap was Jukka's cancer. We had lots of friends both in Finland and abroad, so a blog seemed like a good way of keeping everybody updated on his condition. So four years ago August 2003, we started this thing.
Naming it was surprisingly easy. Wilde's "The Importance of being Earnest" has always been one of my favourite plays, I have a habit of quoting from it almost as much as from Asterix. We were watching the new movie adaptation (With Rupert Everett and Colin Firth), when Jukka suggested that we might coin a name for the blog from one of my favorite scenes: Jack and Algy have been jilted by their sweethearts for pretending to be Ernest, and take the rejection in very different manner. Here is the scene from the classic 1952 version (beginning at 00.30).
We liked the symbolism of the name, of muffins representing life and the manner of eating the manner of living. We liked the juxtaposition of frivolous and serious, it resonated both to our own situation and to the fact that Wilde's most sparkling, shining play was written at a time his life was turning into a nightmare. And we liked the mental image of stuffing your face with muffins in agitation, so very unlike Algy. So that is why we have long unwieldy and silly name for our blog :-)
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