I love muffins! Almond, banana, chocolate! Apple, blueberry, cherry! Love'm, love'm, love'm!

This is one man's tribute to America's tastiest quick bread, so if you don't want to learn everything there is to know about muffins, stop reading now.

Muffins spelled backward is "sniffum," which makes sense, because muffins smell as great as they taste.

At Baskin Robbins, you can get 31 different flavors of muffins. Thirty-one! Wow! Someone should try that with ice cream.

The number of muffin flavors is only limited by your imagination. I know of 237 different flavors. Wait a sec. Got another one: mustard muffins! That makes 238.

Believe it or not, some people eat flax-seed muffins, zucchini muffins, nutty mincemeat muffins. Man, even I don't love muffins that much, and I'm the muffin man.

Did you know that muffins are the only baked goods traded on the national commodity exchanges? Last week they were selling for $3.22 per dozen for December delivery, so it looks like they'll be affordable for the holidays. Whoa! That's a relief!

Americans are gluttons for muffins, eating 87.434 muffins per person per year. (That's a guess. There won't be reliable figures on domestic muffin consumption until after the census.)

Price alert: At Fivebucks, oops, I mean Starbucks Coffee, they nail you $1.95 for a muffin. But Starbucks muffins are responsibly baked and ethically traded, so that probably adds to the cost.

Muffins make great snacks, but nobody eats them at movies. Why the hell not? The muffin industry needs to work on that.

Did you celebrate National Blueberry Muffin Day July 11? I hear all the other muffins were mad, and who can blame them. This is America, and all muffins should be treated equally.

Muffin trivia: You know that fat that squishes up and forms a rim above your poorly fitted jeans. It's called a muffin top. Really.

More trivia: Back in the '60s, stoners baked hash muffins. Or was it brownies? I'm not sure. The '60s are kinda hazy.

Beware of cheap imitations. The English have round toast that they try to pass off as a muffin. The nerve of those people!

Truth is, real muffins are nearly impossible to resist. Remember that little incident in the Garden of Eden? It got edited out of the Bible because ad sales were down and the news hole had shrunk, but Eve actually turned down a Gala, a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious before she took a bite of, you guessed it, an apple muffin.

Diet tip: A big blueberry muffin weighing 168 grams contains 660 calories, which means you can eat three a day on a 2,000-calorie diet as long as you don't eat anything else, which shouldn't be a problem, because if you're lucky enough to have three big blueberry muffins, man, you're set.

Little known fact: Mormons are manic about muffins. They buy muffins by the case. Green Jell-O muffins. Funeral muffins. At BYU, all the parties are BYOM -- bring your own muffin.

Mormon moms are known worldwide for always having a bun in the oven, but the exquisite texture and taste of their mouth-watering home-baked muffins is a mystery to most. Chad Hardy, ex-LDS, is on a mission to change that. His 2010 calendar -- "Hot Mormon Muffins: A Taste of Motherhood" -- features recipes and photographs of Mormon muffins that will make you drool. (The women who baked them are also pictured.)

Critics say the muffins are cheesecake, which just goes to show that some people wouldn't recognize a muffin if they had one in their lap. And the LDS Church declined comment on the calendar, churchese for "we've got nothing nice to say." But even LDS leaders agree that hot Mormon muffins, when consumed in moderation without coffee, are a very good thing.