Instead of discussing what this product resembles, let’s cut straight to the chase, lay it on the line and tell it like it is: this is ion thinking putty! Like most putty products, it’s stretchable, which accounts for 95% of its appeal. Unlike most putty products, it glows in the dark. You can even write on it with a special black light device! Does that make the putty in any way ionic? What do I look like, a rocket scientist? Glowing in the dark is cool, we can all agree on that much. Besides, much more important than the ionic question is the need to know if it’s really thinking putty. Hard to tell, since it’s also mute putty, but it’s nice to imagine that the putty is contemplating glowing without becoming overly concerned about anything too strenuously thoughtful.
There’s more! Putty is much more multi-faceted than you ever imagined.
Behold twilight thinking putty. Once again, stretchable, putty-like, possessing all the fine qualities of putty, who’s been our friend for ages. Twilight thinking putty, however, is heat-sensitive and changes color, making it much, much more believable that this putty is actually doing a little bit of mental cogitatin’. The manufacturer suggests “painting the putty with hot or cold” and performing a speed of light experiment upon it. Yeah, I wish they’d explained how, too. Maybe the thinking putty reveals this secret after purchase.
Thinking putty fun continues with black magnetic thinking putty. This putty is, like the other members of the putty family, malleable, and it has that unmistakable putty odor. But put a magnet near this guy and watch the sparks fly—the two can barely keep their hands off each other. You can tell just by being in the room with it that black magnetic thinking putty is doing a lot of thinking, but its thoughts run to the surly and cruel, so you might not want to engage it in polite conversation. Just buy it a magnet and leave the two of them alone.
Yeah, I know, this looks suspiciously like twilight thinking putty, doesn’t it? But it’s not – it’s scarab thinking putty. Apparently this putty is thinking about shimmering and varying its hue from cerulean to royal purple—typical scarab-thought. Scarabs are single-minded creatures, image-obsessed, practically incapable of independent thinking. So this is sort of the superficial member of the thinking putty family, the one most likely to run away before graduating from high school and end up with a burger flipping job. But yes, of course, like its other family members scarab thinking putty (my hands wanted to type scab thinking putty—wow, can you imagine the fun that would be?) can be pulled and stretched and torn into little pieces, then re-formed into a kind of shapeless mass. It’s putty-tastic, there’s no denying that.
Not one of the advertisements for these thinking putties mentions the capability of image transfer that our old friend Silly Putty had in spades. Maybe it’s implied that thinking putty can clearly do anything that Silly Putty could do, and then some. See, the problem is that Silly Putty let too many people down and couldn’t answer their most important questions, and just wanted to laugh all the time. Let us not forget the toys of yore, lest we be led down the silly path twice. Silly Putty, Silly String, Silly Sand…there was a time when toys could be silly and thoughtless. Those days are completely and utterly over! Welcome to the new world. Coming soon: outsmarting you putty. You’ll never even see it coming.
