The wide-bottomed mug is a common element in our many cultures. It’s a mug designed to not tip over and spill its contents. In Bajoran culture, which only recently re-achieved space travel capability, the mugs hearken back to ocean-going ships and areas prone to earthquakes. In Federation, Klingon, and Cardassian culture, the mug calls back to early starships or war vessels, where the gravometric fields were unstable and the ships would often lurch or lose gravity entirely. The high winds on Cardassia’s desert-filled planets also necessitated wide-bottomed vessels; kanar bottles’ wide bases attest to that, although the shape is mostly for decorative purposes now. The Ferengis, too, have a fondness for wide-bottomed mugs. They’ve had advanced spacefaring capabilities for long enough that they’ve lost the memory of vessels that tilt and rock, and their planetary environment is almost depressingly stable, but they’ve used the shape of the mug to sell it to others, and it’s become a feature of Ferengi restaurants and shops as a sort of in-joke—it’s the ugly mug that you can’t fail to sell, because any wavering customer will be convinced when you demonstrate its invulnerability to tipping.
Deep Space Nine is not unstable. We have no real reason to keep using this kind of mug in all our quarters and shops, private and public-owned. But we do it anyway, marking ourselves as part of a distinct whole, not Bajoran, not Federation, certainly not Cardassian or Ferengi, but something that is built of all of them. We, like the Deep Space Nine mug, are an enigma to those who don’t know our purpose: maintaining stability in turbulence.
