The mister's Vegas mug

Heidi recently did a post on the coffee mug that is seeing her through NaNoWriMo. It's a Las Vegas mug with her name on it that my folks bought for her on one of their many trips to Vegas. I remember asking them to bring a couple back in 2006 after I had the epic fail of not buying one on my first trip to Vegas in May of 06 to see Madonna (seriously, we just barely made our flight as it was without me hemming and hawing over which mug to buy.) So over the years, they've purchased us several different Las Vegas mugs - my favorite being one that condensed the Las Vegas Strip onto one mug, highlighting the most famous hotels and landmarks on the Strip.

This summer, during our very brief stopover in Vegas, I found one that I liked better.

Here's the thing. When we went on our trip out west this summer, I knew that I was going to buy several mugs. It's kind of my thing - I buy one from just about every place I go. I still miss the mammoth mug of the U.S. Capitol that we bought when we went to D.C. in 2000. (I accidentally dropped it on a cement floor and watched it break. Jesus wept.) But what I knew we did not need were more Vegas mugs so if we were to stop there, I would not be buying one. We already have to cycle mugs out of the cupboard to keep them from overflowing.

However, I saw this and could not pass it up.

As you might expect, I hemmed and hawed over it even though it was fantastically cheap (it was certainly no more than 4 bucks.) What eventually tipped the scales in favor of purchasing it was how fabulously retro it is, down to the red dice and iconic Vegas sign. So many of the mugs in Vegas are trashy and gaudy and gross, this one was kind of cute. It was like the little mug that could.

So I purchased it. And it has slowly found its way into my most favored mugs. It's small which necessitates more frequent trips to the kitchen, but I kind of like its smallness. So many mugs are just monstrous nowadays and it's nice to see ones that don't take half the pot of coffee when you fill them.

Deh Jabba wanga

One of the stops that we always make on every trip to Chicago is Gaymart Chicago. The name is actually a bit misleading because, while it does have a lot of Pride merchandise and greeting cards with men in their birthday suits for sale, it also has a TON of pop culture items that I have not been able to find anywhere else. They have a shitload of Doctor Who merchandise that usually you would otherwise end up buying online (I could have bought my Sonic Screwdriver there rather than ordering it from Amazon Sellers) as well as other stuff that frequently borders on the kitschy side of pop culture.

However, I did come across this little wonder, and at 5 bucks, the price was right. It is a Bib Fortuna coffee mug!

(Bib's intergalactic mug shot - no pun intended)

It was actually mislabeled as an Emporer Palpatine mug, if you can believe that.

Anyway, the more I look at it, the more I think that the character of Bib Fortuna must have been inspired (at least a little bit) by Joseph Merrick, probably better known as The Elephant Man. Talk about a story that I was obsessed with when I was a kid. I watched the movie The Elephant Man more times than I can count as a kid. I read the book several times. But more than that, I remember the documentary Some Call Them Freaks that ran over and over again on HBO (and that we probably taped back on the VCR my father used to bring home from school over the summer.) It was narrated by Richard Kiley and featured Robert Wadlow, Robert Earl Hughes, Chang & Eng Bunker and Tom Thumb among others. It rode the line between amazing and a little too scary, but it just kept me coming back for more.

Anyway, here's probably the most famous scene from The Elephant Man. I had completely forgotten about it.



Wow - this post went in a very different direction than I intended. Such is the fun of blogging I suppose.