First, because I don’t get it. Any of it.
And second because, for reasons I don’t understand, it showed up in my feed in place of Frazz.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Yeti is a brand, that makes coolers and thermos containers.
As for the main body, it’s rude to go around bragging that your (whatever) is great, when other people would be happy to have it so good, but have paper cups with cardboard sleeves to keep from burning themselves. Or whatever specific detail fits (whatever).
Yes, James Pollock has it right. I don’t have a Yeti bottle or mug. I have a Contigo Thermolock insulated bottle and it’s swell. I make coffee in the morning with a French press that makes about a quart. Too much to drink all at once. So I fill the 20 ounce bottle with coffee and put the rest in my coffee mug. The bottle keeps it hot for a good number of hours. I am happy to go on about it, as you see. So that’s realistic-ish.
However, where the strip falls down is that it vastly overstates the cost of the things. They’re $25 to $35, depending on size, for the type you’d be likely to use for coffee. Not cheap, but not extravagant. My Contigo bottle was cheaper still. Twenty bucks for two at Costco. It’s reusable, unbreakable, and insulated. Anyone who is dropping $5+ per coffee should be able to afford one after working only a couple of shifts at whatever job employees surly hipsters.
https://www.yeti.com/en_US/drinkware
I make my coffee one styrofoam cup at a time, and I drink it too fast for it to cool down anyway.
I make coffee whenever we have guests that request it. We decided that a matched set of Thermos bottles would be too expensive, so we had to settle for porcelain cups.
$5 coffee and $30 coffee mugs. Most pampered, wasteful culture of all time.
SingaporeBill – sadly, recent research finds some coffee mugs >= $35. A friend showed me his mostly untippable “Mighty Mug”, at $35, but that just started things for me. The Yetis run up to $40+ (and Yeti dog bowls are $45). Then we get into devices that can heat, cool and percolate – “smart mugs” – with names like Ember and Cauldryn Fyre. We’re talking $150+. Let’s not mention the $1,280 coffee cups the US Air Force will work to replace with 3-D printing.
Fighter cockpits don’t have cup-holders, but if they did, they’d have to work at -10G and while flying inverted.
I don’t drink coffee, but… is paying a lot of money for a designer mug any different than when beer drinkers paid (or pay) good money for fancy personalized steins?
I don’t know about “impolite”, as much as “boring”.
@Catlover: “The Yetis run up to $40+”
No, they don’t That link in my comment is to the company’s USA store page. The mugs and tumblers, what you would normally expect to be used for coffee drinking, top out at $34.99 for the 30 ounce Rambler Tumbler. However, the most expensive mug on the page (mugs have handles, tumblers don’t), which is closest to what is depicted in the cartoon, is $29.99. There are insulated bottles at higher prices, from $49.99 for a 36 ounce bottle to $99.99 for a one-gallon bottle, but those are entirely different beasts, not the sort of thing you’d use at the coffee shop.
I agree with you completely about things like the Ember. It’s just an over-complicated solution to a problem which barely exists. If your palate is so refined that your beverage must be at the perfect temperate, you should probably not use the Ember as the bits of the mug that delaminate into the liquid would probably offend your sensibilities (this is a known issue with the item).
@ Lawrence: I don’t think that word means what you think it means. How is purchasing a durable item that will last for many years and be used repeatedly wasteful?
Being quite new to the whole world of coffee drinking, what baffles me is the popularity of something like Starbucks. The coffee all seems very complicated and expensive. There are a dizzying selection of things that aren’t coffee or tea, and I can’t get a seat in the place because it’s full of people who seem to live there. On the other hand, if I go to the Tim Hortons or the McDonalds or one of the local diners, I can get a cheaper cup that tastes fine and have a good chance of getting a seat.
@CIDU Bill: The Yeti mugs and that whole business category, while it may have some hipster cachet, is more functional than fancy beer mugs/steins. They’re durable so they survive drops. Depending on the lid, they may not even spill if dropped. They are double-wall insulated so they keep the beverage hot for hours (or cold for even longer). They’re not unlike the type of Thermos Joe Lunchbox might take to a construction site in concept and if you’ve ever priced those, they’re not cheap either.
BTW, the mug in the drawing actually looks much more like one of the Thermos-brand travel mugs (still priced well under $50) than like a Yeti.
https://www.thermos.com/shop-all.html?p=1#toolbar
I JUST NOW received an email from Big Lots, offering me a free coffee. Of course, I’d have to drive over 10 miles to get this ‘free’ coffee, but I still think someone is reading my emails (not the NSA, just someone messin’ with my mind).
SingaporeBill: “They’re not unlike the type of Thermos Joe Lunchbox might take to a construction site in concept and if you’ve ever priced those, they’re not cheap either.”
They are if you buy them at thrift stores and rummage sales, as I do. I (Shrug Lunchbox ?) brought my own coffee to work in thermi pretty much every day for almost forty years, even when the library opened a coffee shop one floor below in my building. Cheaper and faster, and fortunately my palate isn’t sensitive enough for me to be a believable coffee snob. (Or any other sort of foodie or wine snob, for that matter. )
@ Shrug: They’re even cheaper if you find them in the trash. However, we’re talking about purchase price when new. I’m sure there are ones that cost $50, but not from Yeti. I purchased this pair recently. It was $29 Canadian for two. https://www.amazon.ca/Contigo-Couture-THERMALOCK-Vacuum-Insulated-Stainless/dp/B07KVZ9P81/ref=sr_1_47?keywords=contigo&qid=1553196889&s=gateway&sr=8-47&th=1 The previous pair we purchased from Costco were the same type, but only $20 Canadian per pair.
My purchases don’t make me a fancy pants. I usually just make coffee at home using a $25 French press and $6.00/pound coffee from Costco. It’s certainly cheaper than buying it, even at the Tim Hortons. If you’re going to carry your own container around anyway, why not make it at home, where you have control and can make it exactly the way you like?
Thanks to James Pollock – I’d never heard of Yeti drinkware.
And I’m right there with SingaporeBill, I love my 24 oz stainless steel Contigo Snapseal. Keeps my jamocha hot all day.
@Chak: It’s impolite to talk about posh thermoses in the comments section :)
SingaporeBill: “If you’re going to carry your own container around anyway, why not make it at home,”
Er, I did and do; sorry if that wasn’t clear. (I use a Melitta low-tech drip thing — just put the coffee in a filter in the plastic top piece, and pour over it water I’d headed in a teakettle on the stove. I’ve had the Melitta for so long (maybe thirty years?) that I no longer recall what I originally paid for it.)
The coffee I buy is more expensive than $6/pound, but not a lot more expensive. I’ve usually got multiple bags of three or four different varieties on hand at any given time, since I stock up whenever a local supermarket has any of my favorites on sale.
(I grew up in a Norwegian-American household and started drinking coffee when I was around five years old. I don’t know if it stunted my growth, but if so that’s probably a good thing since as it is I hit my head on low overhangy things a lot already. There is reportedly a deep schism among Norwegian-Americans between fans of very weak and very strong coffee; my clan were pretty much all on the “weak” side, so my coffee stock tends to last a bit longer than it might otherwise do.)
@Shrug: My apologies that I was not clear. I understood that you make/made your own coffee. I was wondering why other people would spend the money and go through the inconvenience of carrying around a container if all they do is go to coffer shops, pay $5 and then pour it into their container.
“my clan were pretty much all on the “weak” side, ”
Hubby is Norwegian-English and on the ‘strong’ side. He can make what he calls ‘sheepherders’ coffee’, grounds boiled in water over a fire, and consider it to be delicious. OTOH, I will only drink the first cup from the pot, whilst he can keep it warming all day and enjoy it ‘to the last drop’.
SingaporeBill, there’s a not-very-popular movement that takes their own reusable drinkware to cafes in order to cut down on disposables.
That said, I make my own at home, too. And I do carry it to coffee shops – because that’s where I meet students sometimes. And yes, I am the sort of person who takes her own coffee to the coffee shop.
@Lawrence: Most pampered, wasteful culture of all time.
I have some information about the late Roman Empire, antebellum slave-owning South, and pre-Terror upper class France that is gonna blow your mind.
@SingaporeBill – I acquiesce that the Yeti thirsty ouncer is indeed $35, and defer to your differentiation of mug versus cargo carrier. I will replace the Yeti with the LEXO (https://lexolife.com/collections/all), which does sit between the $35 items and the $150 ones, at $50-70.
I plead insanity as I, like you, am relatively new to the coffee thing, yet have enough coffee mugs of the insulated ilk, acquired from a lifetime of trade show floor scavenging, never used, to entertain a baseball team or two). My significant other has banned new mugs, shirts, squeezy balls or most other gimmies.
I didn’t know what a Yeti cup is, but I know Thermos is a brand name, not a generic. :-)
“I know Thermos is a brand name, not a generic. ”
So was “aspirin”. “Cellophane”, too.
As well as “kleenex”, “band-aid”, “roller blades”, and “xerox”.
The difference is that the examples I gave aren’t any more. You can buy generic aspirin. You can’t buy generic Kleenex.
Publications aimed at writers often have ads from companies encouraging the writer’s not to genericize their trade names.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/kleenex-is-a-registered-trademark-and-other-appeals-to-journalists/380733/
This is very well-done and entertaining, but I’m still gonna call it velcro.
“Publications aimed at writers often have ads from companies encouraging the writer’s not to genericize their trade names. ”
If your trade name becomes a generic term for a category of products, you can lose your trademark, because your trademark is no longer fulfilling its purpose of identifying your product’s origin.
Aspirin is a special case, Bayer’s rights to the American trademark were revoked by the government in the retributorial aftermath of WWI. It is still a trademark in Germany; generic versions by other manufacturers are called “ASS” (no joke, it’s an acronym for “Acetyl Salicylic Säure“, the last word is German for “acid”).
Shrug – In “Mams’ Bank Account” they are a Norwegian-American family and the children in high school are still too young to drink coffee.
Oops, that was Mama’s Bank Account.
When I was younger – starting at around age 12 and on Weight Watchers – I drank coffee – black with no sweetener. Somewhere in my 20s this caught up with me and my stomach does not like coffee. Robert never drank coffee. So when we had people in to visit – mostly family which meant mostly 2 of our brothers-in-law were served instant. I have thought of making coffee in the period manner at events for our reenactment unit, but before I decided to actually do so, one of the fellows took over the cooking duties (yah!). I have made tea with loose leaves on 2 occasions at events to keep all warm – the first time was before I did the cooking at a particularly cold October event when we were joined into our national group and the second time was at a November timeline event – so cold that when it started to rain and we left the tentage up and came back another day to pack it – ice pieces fell off the tent and fly roofs onto our heads. Tea, must easier to make over the fire. (Okay – you caught me – we should not be drinking tea as it is forbidden and greatly looked down upon (to the point of listing those with tea in the in paper after confiscating it) in our period, so we call it “meadow tea”which was allowable – from the things in the meadow. We did make tea one time, also, when we were portraying loyalist militia (before the battle, after we we were patriot militia) just to show the difference in people thought and behaved – so we could call it tea then. – If that makes any sense – it is late and Robert is pushing me to finish and go to bed.
“Okay – you caught me – we should not be drinking tea as it is forbidden and greatly looked down upon ”
I can see how the colonists might object to BRITISH tea, but wouldn’t Dutch tea be acceptable?
And “ASA” is still in some quarters a semi-standard abbreviation for [the longer chemical name of] aspirin.
I’m sure it was from TV advertising that my junior high nerd buddies and I learned “acetyl salicylic acid”. Also that the active ingredient in Crest was stannous flouride.
“Quick, I need some acetylsalicylic acid — I just accidentally swallowed a Drosophila Melanogaster!”
A black-bellied garbage-loving fruit fly?
” I just accidentally swallowed a Drosophila Melanogaster!”
I don’t know why she swallowed that fly…
I guess she’ll die.
Speaking of ‘Thermos’ . . .
https://assets.amuniversal.com/47afe5a02c9601378b47005056a9545d
Just to elaborate: the ads directed at writers aren’t there primarily to remind writers not to genericize the trademarks, but rather as a way for the companies to show they’ve taken aggressive steps to protect those trademarks. Which sounds kind of backwards, but that’s how trademarks are lost.
That is accurate. Losing a trademark doesn’t come so much from genericide, as from the trademark-owner acquiescing to genericide. If Xerox accepts that “xerox” means “photocopy”, they can’t turn around and insist in court that “xerox” means “a product or service unique to the Xerox corporation”.
@ Andréa – If you add “.gif” to the end of those URLs, then the comic will appear here directly, without having to click on it, like this:
Question: I was just writing someone regarding my purchase of AstroTurf. Is that still a trademarked name, or is that a generic?
I’ve tried that and it’s not worked; I know you mentioned it previously.
The suffix has to match the graphic, I think: .gif for GIFs, .jpg for JPGs…
But . . . how do I know which suffix is used, when it doesn’t show up in ‘View item’? If it showed up, the issue would not arise in the first place. OR should I just assume any comic on GoComics is a ‘.gif’?
Astroturf was, in fact, a trademark. But Astroturf is obsolete, and has been for decades.
so now the term is artificial turf? And I thought AstroTurf was still around. Learn something new ev’ry day!
“I thought AstroTurf was still around.”
It is. Mini-golf courses, for example. But it’s outright dreadful as a field surface for athletic endeavors, so those applications use newer technologies. (Such as FieldTurf)
@ Andréa – I think the reason it failed for you before is that there may have been other characters interfering. The URL has to be completely alone (no text before or after it) on the line. In my experience “.gif” has always worked for GoComics URLs. Technically, they generally store everything as GIFs during the week, but some strips are stored as .JPGs on Sundays. The original reason was probably because Sundays had color, and weekday strips didn’t, but that is no longer the case. However, there are some Sunday strips that use the extra “effects” (color shading etc.), so maybe there is still a reason for it.
This is a test (The URL for last Sunday’s “Wallace the Brave”, which is a JPG, but here with a .gif extension):
P.S. So it looks like .gif will work for any GoComics URL, even if the stored file is a .JPG ;-)
There might be a simpler way, but I go to the page with the comic itself on it (https://assets.amuniversal.com/90caf660c68501366684005056a9545d, for example), then start to save the image in the usual manner. In this particular case it would have saved as a .gif, so what I type in here is the assets URL with a .gif at the end. But it could be .jpg, or .png or something else.
A bit of a .pita, of course…
‘A bit of a .pita, of course…’
So quick with the wit . . . made me laff.
I use an artificial turf made especially for dog pens.
James Pollack – prior to the troubles with GB imports were generally coming through GB if not originally from there. Coins were not sent to the colonies in any amount by GB as they wanted commerce to be on the books of the British/Scottish factors and all commerce with other countries and the colonies should go through GB. As I explain – cotton was a more expensive fabric than linen or wool as it came it from India (not much cotton grown in colonies/US until Eli Whitney cotton gin). It went from India to GB – taxed coming into to GB – and then would be reshipped to the colonies – taxed again and sent on British ships. So normally goods from Holland would be coming from GB and on British ships.
During the period of the Revolution colonial ports were often blockaded so that ships could not come into port with supplies. It is only later that Dutch tea starts coming in.
The other part to this is – similar to having a victory garden in WW2 was patriotic, not drinking tea was considered to be patriotic to the colonial cause. The fact the tea was Dutch and not British would not be obvious if one served it or was seen drinking it – so it was safer not to have any tea, other than “meadow” tea. Even tea one had from before the trouble started was not suppose to be used. If one was found drinking tea one’s name would be published in the newspaper as sort of an enemy of the cause.
The way I was taught it, the colonists happily paid more for smuggled Dutch tea than for officially-taxed British tea, and the British knew it but were unable to stop the smuggling.
Hooray for the Dutch (except we were, I believe, also in the slave trade).
The British tea was cheaper, even with the taxes, but as far as “happily paid more”… it would be more accurate to say they were riled up to reject British tea: it would not be unfair to call Sam Adams a rabble-rouser.
When my son was eight, we visited the Boston Tea Party Tourist Area (or whatever they really call it). When the guide told us about the British tea tax, my son was skeptical of the story and asked how much the tax actually was. Nobody knew, and I had a pretty fun time of it looking that up pre-Internet, It was the first I’d known that British tea was actually cheaper. That’s NOT the narrative we were taught in schools.
A few years later, as a substitute teacher, this came up an I told the kids this little tidbit. The regular teacher… was not pleased that I strayed from the party line. But I couldn’t lie to the kids, could I?
Bill: A while ago I read a British history textbook, and it was often interesting to see the different perspective on events in America. Their summary of the Tea Party events was something like “Parliament came up with what seemed like the perfect win-win solution, where the colonists would get cheap tea, and Parliament would get to tax just one good. Unfortunately, . . .”
It was also fun to see their perspective on the War of 1812, which figures so big in our history books, but for them was just a page in a long chapter on the Napoleanic wars, basically saying “BTW, there was a war with the U.S. as well. We don’t have the space to go into details here, check out the bibliography if you want to know more.”
Oh, everybody was in the slave trade. I love how some countries get so sanctimonious with “Oh, we abolished slavery the importation of slaves in 1790 and slavery itself in 1825, but YOUR horrid country didn’t abolish the importation of slaves until 1801 and slavery itself until 1830.”
And they’re serious about it.
An interesting article (we’re about to topic drift out to sea) . . .
https://dutchreview.com/featured/dutch-slavery-our-dark-past/
As I understand the tax on the tea was “a mere thrupence” (3 pence) – on what quantity I have no idea. Tea was being smuggled into the country financed by various merchants – including John Hancock – and the tea with the tax was cheaper than the illegal tea – it was the idea not the cost. When they set up the no tea at all rules they did it in stages – as of this date you cannot bring it into the colonies, as of this date you can no longer sell the tea, as of this date you can no longer have it in your house or drink it. The enforcement was basically by embarrassment and threatening people to not do business with them, etc.
I am in an online needlework group that dropped down to mostly me and two ladies in the UK. They keep asking me questions about the US colonial period as they told me that it is not taught in school.
I subscribe to BBC History magazine. In recent issues there have been articles on the slave trade and its connections to various locations and people in (what was then) England. Apparently people there do not know that ships bringing the slaves here and also there were British ships and this is a surprise to them.
CIDU Bill – I am presuming an error in “you abolished slavery in 1830” or a reference to another country as it was not abolished in the US until the mid 1860s.
What we call the French and Indian War (partially started by George Washington) is called the Seven Years War elsewhere and was actually so widespread that it is considered to actually be the first world war.
The $50 mug=Yeti
It’s impolite to talk about it in a coffee bar because the coffee bar sells other, similar cups.
Therefore, she is not using proper Yeti-quette.
@ maggie the cartoonist – We don’t often see the re-incarnation of a CIDU post from that far back, but it was very nice to re-read a bunch of comments from CIDU Bill (R.I.P.) – it’s a pity that he was not able to read yours.
P.S. @ maggie – While reading the first page of comments on this post, I noticed one about “weak” coffee vs. “strong” coffee clans, and I wanted to mention a relevant gag in the charming movie “Bagdad Cafe” (a.k.a. “Out of Rosenheim” in Germany). Unfortunately, when I went back to find out whose name I should put on the note, I discovered that it would have been to “Shrug” (again, R.I.P.)
And we never did solve the mystery of why this comic showed up in Bill’s Frazz feed…
Cold Case, CIDU
* DA-DUM!*