Silly Putty

It's official: we've now tried the time-honored tradition of using Silly Putty on a newspaper. On Easter, one of the eggs that Madison found in her basket was one filled with Silly Putty. Few people realize that silly putty really comes from eggs. It is a little known fact that a very rare Argentinian bird, the Petrochilidon Silliputusargentinius, is the big reason why we enjoy Silly Putty to this day. Shortly after this amazing discovery in the 1940's, agile Argentinian youth were employed to scale towering truffula trees in order to scour nests for eggs. Naturally, with the boom of popularity in the product, the bird population found itself on the endangered species list. This led to an outcry to protect the bird, which of course is the national bird of Argentina. Yet, despite the protests, the "harvesting" of silly putty eggs continued unabashed. Money was a far greater power during these times, which just goes to show you how much things have changed. Fortunately, a young woman named Eva Perón arose from seemingly nowhere, and used the Petrochilidon Silliputusargentinius as a campaign issue during her election. Patriotism stirred, and the citizens of the land overwhelmingly elected her because of her daring ideas for change. It was because of her that the vast ranches were set up, where rancheros could breed and harvest literally millions more Silly Putty eggs per year. They stand there to this day, a testament to the people there, and the leadership of the woman they knew as Evita. Andrew Lloyd Weber was so moved by the story, he wrote a play about her. He just left the Silly Putty part out.

Here is Madison, using

some of this Silly Putty today, completely unaware of the amazing history behind this product. In the old days when Mommy and Daddy were younger (which was about ten years ago), we used to take Silly Putty and push it down onto the comics section of a newspaper. We'd press it down as flat as it could, and when we lifted it, we could see the mirror image of the comics right there on the Silly Putty. Remembering how great this was, we set out to reproduce this amazing feeling with Madison. Yes, as you can see above, she's stunned! But seriously, here's the final product below, after Madison applies the necessary amount of force (100 standard Newtons), after she's eaten the necessary amount of sugar to apply such force (100 standard Fig Newtons).

Eureka! Success! She's smiling brightly, because you can see some random comic character actually on the Silly Putty. Such joy in scientific discovery! But in our day, things were so much better. Of course, in all things, in our day things were so much better in general. Even if they weren't. But seriously, with Silly Putty, it used to be a whole lot better for sure. Now don't blame the Silly Putty. It's actually the ink they use on newspapers - it used to be when you pressed Silly Putty down onto a comic*, you got a lot of that ink on your Silly Putty. It was like you actually had Garfield printed on your Silly Putty. These days, you can't do that so much any more. It is my personal belief that this singular issue is why Silly Putty is not as popular as it used to be. Which is yet another reason to blame newspaper people. Stupid decisions by newspapers! I mean, think of all those Argentinian Silly Putty Harvesters?

* We stopped calling this section of the paper "funnies" a long time ago, as they stopped being "funny" a long time ago. Frankly, I was surprised to see a comic section in the newspaper after all these years. I figured it went the way of Saturday morning cartoons. I remember growing up, we'd race to the comics, wanting to check out "Calvin & Hobbes," "Garfield," "The Far Side," and my personal favorite, "Bloom County."