There are a lot of great traditions in the world of late night. Every host has to endure the wrath of Mother Nature's cruel comedy by letting an animal crap in their lap. Every host has to invite a nutball celebrity who is guaranteed to shoot up or snort something in the green room five seconds before their interview.

But one lesser known, some would say downright boring, tradition has gone by the wayside. Maybe that's because the choices are usually something boring. There was Johnny Carson's face mug, Conan O'Brien's Eisenhower mug and some boring old mug that's so dull, they couldn't even sell it in the gift shop to tourists who would buy a bag of puke if it had the Last Call with Carson Daly logo on it.

All of that changed when CBS' Craig Ferguson revived this grand tradition by jamming a cardiac needle of adrenaline into its heart with his mug.

Ferguson received a rather unusual gift from In Plain Sight star Mary McCormack: a rattlesnake mug from Albuquerque's National Rattlesnake Museum. The mug looks like the kind of gift Barack Obama's White House staff would buy for the British Prime Minster's family, but Ferguson absolutely fell in love with it.

He loved it so much that he officially christened it as the official Late Late Show desk mug by smashing the old one. It's a good thing Mary didn't give him a new dog or, well, I'd rather not think about it.



It might seem like a little thing, but this represents a huge step for Ferguson and his show. Ferguson's desk was just a boring, barren wasteland of varnished oak and scraps of paper. Now he has something personal and crazy that gives his show a stronger sense of style and naturalness that cements his presence on the show. It also doesn't hurt that this mug could kick the ass of any other coffee mug in the history of late night, if coffee mugs had asses.