Consider a cup.

A cup is a roughly hemi-spherical container with a device attached for easy grasping with the hand. A cup can contain water, lemonade, tea, hot chocolate, cold pudding (or if you mix up the packages, cold chocolate and hot pudding), hot gelatin, solidified gelatin, noodles and cheese, petit fours, caviar, dirt, or African Violets. A cup can be made of plastic, metal, paper, waxed paper, bone china, stoneware, or chain link fence (for very fast drinkers). The sides may be striated with 1/4, 12/ and 3/4 cup marks. Then you can see graphically the small rations you must exist on. You can also measure accurately the ingredients for various dishes. However, since most of the time you do not bring the box with the directions written on the side, you end up doing things by guess and by golly anyway.

Plastic cups are advantageous because they do not break, no not get hot, and you can drill holes in the handle to tie the to your belt. You can scratch your name in the bottom (and if you scratch too deeply you can reduce your intake of liquid enormously) and if you heat food in them over the stove you can suddenly find yourself with one less thing to carry out.

Metal cups are nice because you can polish them and use them to signal Search and Rescue, you can drop them over a cliff with nothing but a few minor dents resulting, and you can heat things over the stove with them and permanently brand yourself when you try to pick up the cup by its hot handle.

Which leads us to that paragon of cups, the Sierra Cup. The Sierra cup is cleverly constructed so that the lip of the cup stays cool while the contents are boiling hot. This way you do not burn your lip when you drink from it. Instead the boiling liquid enters your mouth to burn your tongue, larynx, esophagus, and stomach lining.. Sierra cups are, above all, perfectly shaped for panning gold. Older Sierra Club members were allowed to carry a Sierra Cup with the proud embossing of “Sierra Club” on the bottom. However, if you have ever tried to clean a cup with the aforementioned legend so embossed, you may be tempted to pay dues to the Wilderness Society instead.

Cups can be used to get water out of a creek for transferal to a canteen, to catch pollywogs, to start an ant farm, to throw water at someone, as an emergency jai alai scoop, to plant an organically grown carrot in, as an emergency hat, as part of a first-aid kit to catch blood if you cut yourself, to dig an elephant trap, and to drink out of.

Why deprive yourself of this benefit to humankind any longer? Why deny yourself a position in the ranks of cup owners? Why drink scalding hot tea out of your cupped hands for another second? Run out now and get a cup.