Sloppy Edwards? You may be saying to yourself, “Sure, The Sloppy Edwards would be a good name for a band, but why call a personal website sloppyedwards.com, especially when the guy’s name is Stephen M. Long?” Well, sit back, strap yourself in, grab a cool beverage if you like, and your friendly webmaster (that would be me) will attempt to explain how your favorite website got it’s name.

Set your Zwiebach Machine for January 2004. (hang on a second…someone is trying to get my attention…)

. . .
you know, the guy who invented that dry toast that babies eat and the time machine they used on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.
. . .
It’s called “Wayback” toast?
. . .
Oh. Right. Well.

Um…set your Wayback Machine for January 2004. . . . (electrical humming noise) . . .

The year is now 2004. (Unless you went too far back; in which case, good luck.) The good folks at 1&1 have given me an opportunity to try their Free Professional Preview Package and have my own domain name for the low, low price of only $5.99 per year. That seems like a pretty good deal, so I look to see if stevelong.com is available…nope. Hmmm…stevelong.net…nope. Okay, how about thelongfamily.com… nope. stephenlong, thelongs, .com, .net, .org, pretty much every form of a personably identifiable domain I tried was already taken. The only things left were the relatively new, relatively unknown .name, .info, .us variations.

Well, I really preferred a .com domain, so I started thinking about what else might have some significance to me, and would be unique. I don’t know why it came to mind, but I remembered something from when I was a young child eating the sloppy joes and carrot sticks my mom had made for lunch. Who decided to call them sloppy joes, I wondered. My grandfather’s name was Edward. Couldn’t they just have easily have been called sloppy edwards?

Let’s see…sloppyedwards.com…AVAILABLE! I’ll take it!