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09 May 2008
Friday Mugs. Play in your workplace or home. What's the ugliest mug in your kitchen/coffee area? Describe.
In the cupboard in the office kitchen is one of those "put your picture on a mug" mugs with a badly faded, weirdly washed-out photo of someone's unattractive children--8 or 9 years old--with food smeared all over them. It's less ugly and more creepy. The mug and kids in question belong to no-one currently working here.
I have only two random mugs. My office mugs are both dark blue and my mugs at home are blue willow. The random mugs are a mug with a Get Fuzzy comic on it that Guy sent me 8-9 years ago and a red steeping mug for tea.
I have a "bad day" mug made by Ayers Pottery in Hannibal, MO. Think of a typical two-tone glazed pottery mug, but then warp it and lopside it until it barely sits on the table. It's great.
This mug was a gift from a friend. It's stoneware, with a cat on each side, and it slants, the idea being that you can't knock it over, so it's great to use at the computer. But it's so ugly I can't bear to use it. And I also find that stoneware gives coffee a strange taste. I prefer to use a cheap porcelain (pottery) mug instead.
I have this old Star Trek mug where Kirk, Spock & McCoy would "beam up" with the addition of a hot liquid. For some reason (ancient-ness?) it no longer functions, and is just plain gnarly-looking now. Also it not nearly large enough for the coffee I require.
This is my office mug. I inherited it some years ago from a very old lawyer named Edwin Roast who retired at the age of 83. He was a lovely old gentleman, but found the practice of law in the last 20 years of his career a far different animal from when he embarked on it in the 1930s.
So, I don't really have any ugly mugs because I work from home, and have only about six square inches allotted for mug storage space - so I have very few: four red mugs from Romania, two tea mugs from China, and a bunny mug from Miko. Can I show off my bunny mug from Miko in the ugly mug thread? Even if it's not ugly, but cute, cute, cute?
We have lots of nerdly mugs here with little icons of molecules and the chemical model of "caffeine" naturally figures frequently in the mix.
I'm drinking out of a (I think) rather handsome cobalt blue-and-white "Agilent Technologies" mug; sunburst logo and name were both designed with discretion and excellent typography.
By far the ugliest mug in the coffee service cupboard (and this is even considering stray beakers and random Pyrex glassware that's been 'repurposed' from the labs) is this plain, battered, 1970's-looking drab poo brown thing. It's not merely ugly, it is BORING. The poor sad thing is always the last one sitting in there.
My boss bought the entire office these mugs, monogrammed for each of us, for holiday gifts. So that's what I use, though I don't drink coffee at the office that much.
Because we have to have nice plates and utensils and glasses and things for our board meetings here, most of the mugs we have are nice Crate & Barrel things. The rest are pretty simple swag promotional things; nothing really stands out as ugly.
I've got a mug that a coworker bought for me on her honeymoon. Suffice it to say that it says 'Hey Mon, We Be Jammin'!' on it. I keep a tiny cactus in it.
Have a big mug with my real first name on it. While getting rid of stuff last year, I donated it to the church thrift shop. Soon after, a good friend who worked in the thrift shop said, "hey, look what I found, I brought you a present!" I accepted it without mentioning its origins, thinking that God probably wanted me to have the mug. And He/She turned out to be right, because when I started eating oatmeal in the morning, it was the only mug I had that was the right size!
How nice to see the bunny again! He had a long sojourn with me before he went to Greece.
My Ugly Mug is an old 1970s ceramic mug. It was probably once colorful, but all the colors other than a sickly yellow and green,or perhaps I should say Harvest Gold and Avocado, have faded. It depicts a grumpy Snoopy, glaring at a Harvest Gold supper dish. On the other side, in block letters, it says "I HATE IT WHEN IT SNOWS ON MY FRENCH TOAST."
A friend made me an affirmation mug for Christmas a couple years ago. It has pictures of me on it and it says "I Am Wonderful!" on one side and "I Am Truly Hot" on the other. Just looking at it makes me cringe with embarrassment but I can't bring myself, somehow, to toss it. I mean, she meant well. Still. I do not want to look at myself when I'm drinking coffee and oh god, the kids have teased me about it unmercifully ever since it appeared in the kitchen.
I want to make mgl an affirmation mug that says "you are Truly Hot", and, after a quarter turn, says "Really! Smokin'!". And after another quarter it says "No, really! Turn off the fucking stove!!"
On second thought, I'd just keep it myself.
Love that story, msali. Things we give away, sell, whatever, that come back to us are cool. And creepy.
I used to have, and might still have somewhere a big ass mug with airplanes on it. Thing is they're depicted as if they were needlepoint. Man that's an ugly mug. Uglier than my own mug even, and that's saying a lot. I may have broken it, but if it's still here I will take a photo of it.
Every mug i ever loved was killed in some senseless accident. My favorite fork has been mangled twice after declarations of love (via disposal). My remaining mugs range from serviceable to insipid in pervasively common way.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
