Karl, a faceless, putty-colored model Dr. Xu created 20 years ago, still sits on a desk in his lab.

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The fire service sealed the drum with putty and a bigger "jam-jar" container.

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And if the Farrellys couldn't cast their movie with lookalikes, they would find three actors willing to be silly putty in their mischievous hands.

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Acres of beige or putty-colored cubicles, like the herds of buffalo that ranged across the American west, are long-gone, replaced by a mobile, distributed workforce who is no longer tethered to a central location.

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Dressed in a thin putty-colored sweater, jeans and trendy black slip-on sneakers with white bottoms, Mr. Robinson had just returned from the Venetian Las Vegas, where he is presenting Human Nature, an Australian vocal group that performs Motown hits.

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His use of the andante movement of Mozart's String Quartet No. 23 in F Major is casual at best, stretching out, for a listlessly choreographed full-cast exit, the music's final note as if it were just so much Silly Putty.

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But with the one-size-bigger Countryman hitting dealerships now, and a Mini coupe and roadster coming soon, plus the likely Paceman crossover coupe, Mini to me is looking more and more like a wad of Silly Putty being stretched and deformed into too many shapes.

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It led him to his experiments with the NeXT computer and then to the iMac after he returned to Apple, when he moved further beyond the original narrow view of the personal computer by renouncing the ubiquitous putty-colored box with a monitor on top of it.

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