Though some people will, most of the time, be more concerned with the contents of the mug than the mug itself, this one is going to have you double-taking before you take your first sip of Yorkshire’s finest in the morning.
The right mug can make all the difference to a brew. The thickness of the handle, the way it feels on your lips and, of course, the design of the thing itself, for example. It really can feel like the choice Indiana Jones had to make when he picked the Holy Grail at the end of The Last Crusade.
Not to put too much pressure on mugs or anything…
Master craftsman, artist and puzzle-maker Tony Fisher has created a mug that somehow is both square and round and all kinds of confusing, taking the whole ‘square peg round hole’ debate to strange new levels.
Check it out:
To show there are no camera tricks, Tony even fills the mug with milk and stirs it around with a spoon, using the mirror to show off the reversed shape.
Weird right? Amazing what you can do with mirrors and different perspectives. It’s always about perspective. David Blaine would be proud.
This seems like the perfect time to bring back some other confusing trends that have done the rounds in a section I like to call ‘Great Head-Scratchers of the Internet’.
Back in 2007, an actor by the name of Jay Aubrey Jones recorded a few words the website Vocabulary.com. Then, years later, his dulcet tones caused an outrage across the old interweb as people just couldn’t agree on what Jay was saying – yanny or laurel.
Of course, it wasn’t Jay’s fault. People hear what they want to hear. It’s a skill many politicians are adept at.
Thankfully, after letting many people tear their hair out for some time (not Trump though, that guy wouldn’t waste his precious, perfectly coiffed hair on a mere viral trend), Jay put the whole thing to rest by revealing what he really said. It was laurel.
Speaking to TIME, the actor said:
I recorded my batch of words and I thought that was that.
I thought, well, it couldn’t be that huge. Then I heard the recording again online and I realised what a brouhaha this whole thing was.
Brouhaha. The guy knows some great words.
He did, however, claim that he often hears yanny too, explaining:
More often than not, I hear laurel. I can hear a slight trace of yanny.
Jones apparently recorded 36,000 words for Vocabulary.com. The recording of this particular word went viral when a student came across the sound bite and heard ‘yanny’.
Said student then posted the clip online asking people what they heard: yanny or laurel. And at that, this head-scratcher of the internet was born! Students have so much to answer for.
Tune in at the same time next week for more Great Head-Scratchers of the Internet.
In the meantime, I’ll just leave this here.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk
Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.