Thought I’d share this Sunday fun while you’re waiting for the boxes to get opened. . . . a piece I’m running today on my personal blog.

This Just In from The 65th Crayon:

When he got the call to attend a meeting at Google headquarters, The 65th Crayon was a little perplexed. Our reporter friend hadn’t been there since he had taken them to task last fall for the problem of dlites and dlogs–fake websites and blogs set up by dogs–in the case of the invisible dog spamming the Internet.

“I thought they might be calling for a follow up report,” said our supersleuth reporter, “or I considered that they might have had some new ideas about related Adsense Words. To my surprise, it was nothing of the sort.”

At this point, our remarkable friend pulled a red plastic egg from his pocket, saying “You might not remember these. “This is the original Silly Putty, made from the work of engineer James Wright, who was trying to invent a new kind of rubber. It became a famous toy when it was introduced on the Howdy Doody Show. Since then kids have been pulling, turning, and twisting it and of course, pressing it against the newspaper to pick up pictures.”

“It appears that Crayola the company that sells Silly Putty now offers it in another size–Silly Putty Bulk–and several colors. Apparently the engineers at Google decided that they needed a lot of it.”

The Google engineers tell the story quite well at the Google Blog. This image shows how they put the bulk shipment they were going to share together in a pile for a picture. Later, they couldn’t pry the Google glob apart so that each owner could claim his or her blob of the bigger glob. That’s why they had called in the 65th Crayon.

“Silly people. They thought I might be able topull apart 250 pounds of stuck together Silly Putty. Had they used their famous search engine, they would have known,” the 65th said seriously. “You always call in the crayon expert before handling explosives or Silly Putty.”

Then in usual fashion, our reporter friend tied his trench coat belt and walked off, like Humphrey Bogart.