The people who make vessels for the rest of us to drink from seem to do their absolute flaming best to make them so unstable – with all that ice at the top, how stable can a glass be? OR if not that, out of some plastic that sweats literal rivers of condensation all the way down them – or do not make them big enough, to contain, perhaps ONE CAN OF A BEVERAGE WITH ¼ OF CRUSHED ICE WITHIN that does NOT take the shape of a triangle, with the tiny end at the base, just WAITING for a careless sweep of the hand to upend the ENTIRE MESS that you just made, crushed ice, juice and all, all over your table that is covered with sensitive electronics like your iPad, your remote controls, your Apple TV remote, your book and/or important papers, and you have JUST RUN OUT OF PAPER TOWELS . . .
Does this miracle glass exist? I believe that it doesn’t. I don’t think there is a human being alive who can design a glass that can ONLY BE TOPPLED WITH A SUPERHUMAN EFFORT, is not made of anything except plastic, has no handles, no “sippy tops” or any other gimmicks . . . go ahead. Prove to me that such a thing exists that is taller that three inches.
Because I’m at the END OF MY GODDAMNED ROPE, the only glass that fit all those bills having cracked after its 7,000th dishwashing and NOTHING, ANYWHERE TO REPLACE IT.
I don’t need a glass that keeps drinks cold (and sweats so much that it falls out of your hands if you even DARE pick it up) or some other “Picnic” glass that is DESIGNED to be knocked over with the finger push of an infant – JUST GIVE ME A GLASS THAT HOLDS MORE THAN A CAN OF COKE THAT WILL NOT TIP OVER IF YOU SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER.
Is this SO MUCH TO ASK FOR?
You can file this under “Frustration at stupid human engineers.”
Well, a glass with a base a foot wide and a height of 3" seems unlikely to be tipped over. That sort of breadth is a small price to pay if your main goal is an untippable glass.
I go not quite so far. I have a set of glas mugs that are maybe one and a half times larger at the base that at the top, and I don’t think they’ve ever tipped over.
Thank you, my well-meaning feathered friend who is obviously in the last hour of his shift at the Spiffy Lube Tire and Refreshments Center at the cross street of Maple and MacArthur in Wilmington, S. Dakota who is sneaking a look at the Internet on his Pentium II running Windows 95, knowing his boss, Mr. Elkenhertz, can’t see well enough to peruse the “history” in the Mosaic browser, even though he doesn’t even know what a “history” is and anyway, would say, “Skinny,” (that’s your nickname around town) "I don’t care what you do after hours as long as you don’t book tickets for me and Annie (his niece, nothing weird going on there – his brother Petey died six years ago in a freak threshing machine accident down over at the Lamonts’ farm, where he had graciously volunteered to fill in for Willy Lamont, who was in the hospital with pneumonia at the time and, three weeks later, unfortunately succumbed even though Doctor Paley did his best but I guess it was Willy’s time anyway, and Mr. Elkenhertz was so kind as to volunteer to take care of Annie “as long as the Lord asks me to,” since his own wife Cindy died of them darn cigarettes (mesothelioma, they said even though they told you that was a miner’s disease) fourteen years ago, (just next week, I believe!)
Thank you.
I do appreciate your efforts to save this one person the eternal aggravation of having his goddamned glass upended; its new incarnation now sits, precariously (like you said about the only glass I’m going to trust from now on is wider at the bottom than at the top) and it’s only a matter of a tiny yocto-second before it too, joins its brothers in its time-honored quest to verify the law that Things with a Preponderance of Mass Above a Base of Lesser Preponderance of Mass Will Tend to Decay to a State in which the Two Inequalities of Mass x Time Spent Utilizing Said Object Shall Equalize, Ruining Remote Control Brand Name “X” where “X” is usually a “Samsung.”
Thank you very much.
Anyone else care to weigh in? Heh, I make Joke, in case it was not plain that “weigh in” had to do with the propensity of my liquid-filled vessels tend to topple, unaided except by random luck, by “weighing in” their last.
I think the Mighty Mug might be the one I saw at Bed Bath & Beyond. It was on display and as I said ‘what’s this’ I knocked it over by accident.
It works by having a very small suction cup type thing on the bottom that releases with the smallest amount of upward pressure (by design). So if you grab or lift it, you can move it, but if you knock it sideways it really does stay put. At BBB, they had it on a shelf that was at about elbow height so when I went to see what it was my arm was already in an upward arc which released it.
As for that video, again, if you knock it ‘upwards’ it’s going to fall, but it is much harder to topple than a random cup.
You might want to go to BBB and take a look at it.
Oh and another thing, I’m one of those people that knocks things over all the time (hence my above story), so I just use things with covers. Get an insulated travel thermos for home with a flip cap so it’ll at least contain most of the spill. At work I don’t allow cups anywhere near my desk. If you must sit at my desk and must have a beverage it has to have a cap on it. Hell, I knock my bottled water over at least once a day, but with the cap on, it really doesn’t matter.
Drag City, in that it fails to meet my additional (perverse) requirements that it be semi-see through, and NOT designed to fit into the cup holder of ANYTHING.
If I wanted a cup/mug/glass that I REALLY didn’t want to fall over, I would glue or melt a large lead weight to the bottom, which unfortunately triple its weight, full, look bizarre and poison everything the dishwasher.
My mug of choice: NEVER takes hot drinks; MUST be transparent to some degree; BE REASONABLY light so it does not feel inordinately, stupidly heavy to lift, like those dumb mugs that have a gel-like inside lining that freezes and “keeps your drinks cold even on a hot summers day!” yet sweats so much condensation as to need a paper towel just to keep under it to prevent rivers of condensation soaking everything around; and be CHEAP.
If I proposed this to the folks at JPL I wonder what they’d come up with.
FUCK gecko gloves. STOP MY FUCKING GLASS FROM FALLING OVER.
Random chance dictates that if I use this glass all day, every day, I don’t need to wave my arms around all the time for it to fall over.
I don’t need the glass to NEVER tip over, I just need the glass to RARELY tip over with normal use. Now, if the sleeve of my bathrobe brushing the rim of the glass constitutes my “waving my arms around” then I guess this project is doomed.
Hold on a sec—how serious are you about that last requirement? Because it occurs to me that you could solve your problem with an ordinary glass, but with a specially designed cup-holder to put it in—like a car cup-holder, but the kind you could use around the house or in the office or wherever.
I’m working on a table with a built in electromagnet. The large glass has a metal bottom. When you need a drink you just flip a switch to kill the magnet. Simple!
That would be less stable than a glass with an infinite amount of legs (a round base).
Just to be sure, the kill switch really should include biometrics AND a CAPTCHA. You need to make sure the the user really wants to move that glass. Better yet, just glue the cup down and get him a straw.
