Your Ugly Mug
01.17.07 By Collin DavidI guess it’s one of those collections that unintentionally begins from a accumulation of items of relative disposability and inconsequence, these coffee mugs. I mean, I don’t even drink coffee on a regular basis. While usually perceived as both a staple for both the gaming nerd and the artist-on-deadline, coffee just makes me more crampy and irate than usual. Nonetheless, I still need something to take my cocoa and tea from when all of the skulls of my enemies are in the dishwasher.
Like neckties, the coffee mug is sort of an icon of adulthood (even if it does contain something with marshmallows floating in it). You wouldn’t be hard pressed to find a coffee mug with just about anything you’d like on it, usually for less than five bucks, and that’s probably where it all began - two Star Trek that mugs changed color according to temperature, either uncloaking a Romulan Warbird or transporting the away team to some rocky planetside adventure where the new guy would invariably get killed by something with a funny forehead.
While I eschew mugs with ‘clever’ slogans or sarcastic remarks on them, anything with flowers or babies, or those unfortunate mugs shaped like nude torsos (such as in this respetable collection), they certainly dominate the species. Coffee mugs are indeed a minefield where poor taste might explode in your face at any given moment, since just about anyone can make one. Somewhere in the world, there’s collection of people large enough to have made ‘Jeff Foxworthy’ a household name. I figure that the tasteless coffee mugs come from somewhere in that vicinity.
My personal favorite mug is the Mr. Incredible mug, which I actually braved the Disney store to purchase. It’s about the size of a cantaloupe and cast on a slant, making it appear as if it’s moving at ultra-high speed. When I drink cocoa, I DRINK COCOA. You’d better stand back and wear goggles. I take two packets, baby.
Perhaps a runner up to the action mug is this alphabet mug, featuring an octopus. One of the many delights that graced the dollar store shelves, and completely inexplicable, it’s the kind of gloriously ugly item that redefines your life for approximately 30 seconds. You know, until you regain faith in a higher power and stop excreting things, in spite of the item in question. It was nestled between an array of alphabet mugs which covered an eclectic selection of the alphabet, and a few things that probably weren’t letters as much as they were lexical approximations of the sound that the soul makes when it leaves the body. Of note, but left behind, was the ‘I is for ice-pop’ mug, which due to the limited paint palette, was an unsettling fleshy color. Imagine your way from there. ‘I’ is for impossibly suggestive. For the record, yeah, I keep pencils in the octo-mug. I don’t generally put my lips on things I find in dollar stores.
Closet cleaning this past weekend revealed this hand-painted mug that my former girlfriend made for me while I was madly in love with her and she didn’t know it yet. Using the dorm’s communal oven to bake on the glaze, and subsequently forgetting that she’d left a mug in there for me and causing a significant cloud of toxic smoke, it was nonetheless an important item in our relationship. Sure, it was stolen from the dining hall, but we had to do SOMETHING to justify the ridiculous price for the mediocre education. I still have a small crate of misappropriated forks, and some part of an elevator that probably was really important at some point.
My friend Beth recently sent me a lovely handmade mug from Dovetail, one of the many excellent craftspeoples that can be found on Etsy. If you want to lower your standards a bit, CafePress has over 53,000 user-designed mugs that cover just about everything in existence, usually with excessive spelling errors - though they DO have an exceptional collection of squid-themed liquid receptacles. Just about 90% of every store you walk into should have a coffee mug for sale, promoting your love of something-or-other to anyone who might pass by your otherwise dreary cubicle.
I’m off to consume three gallons of cocoa from my favorite mug. It’s one of the more comforting things I can hope to retreat to nightly.
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Article Tags: CafePress, coffee mugs, Dovetail, Mr. Incredible================
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March 25th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I just broke my Mr. Incredibles mug and I am extremely distraught about this…do you have any idea where I could purchase another one????
Please help!
March 25th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Ahoy!
I DO see them pop up on eBay every so often, but I believe that they were Disney Store exclusive items, making them not-too-easy to find. There’s a few other ‘leaning’ mugs from the movie up at the moment… keep an eye out! I’ve thought of buying a backup just in case.