Thought-Provoking WHAT?

I was not at my best this afternoon. In the post-lunch phase I found myself inattentive and distracted, and for at least five minutes I stared at the back of a model magazine that happened to be on my desk. It was upside down, but I can read upsidaisium, up to a pointium.

It was an ad from a company that was selling pre-assembled, pre-painted military models. This has always seemed strange to be because most of the enjoyment I get out of modeling comes from the assembly and painting thereof, and the actual gazing-at-the-finished-model part is usually pretty banal. But, what's true for me isn't true for everyone, and it turns out that pre-built models are actually pretty popular these days.

So I was staring at the ad and saw that they were selling, among other things, prepainted historical miniatures of German soldiers (the dividing line between "toy soldiers" and "historical miniatures" is that what I own are historical miniatures; what you own are toy soldiers). The ad copy was a tissue of lies and misstatements, but what really amused me with the notion that the soldiers had been sculpted in "thought-provoking battle poses." I am not making that up. Thought-provoking battle poses. To me, a thought-provoking battle pose is General Patton going to war in a Carmen Miranda hat. Or Julius Caesar arriving fashionably late at the Battle of Pharsalus aboard a mutant five-legged goat. Or Terry-Thomas leading the troops ashore on Gold Beach while trying to keep his feather boa out of the surf.

But what have we got, thought-provoking-battle-pose-wise? One guy looks for all the world like Julia Child gripping a yam that is ever so slightly sexually suggestive. One guy looks like he just hit his head on the cabinet door, really hard, and is afraid to probe his scalp lest he find blood. Another guy has the kind of spooky dead-eyed aspect that I normally associate with Little Orphan Annie and her cadre of brain-dead zombies. Of the Germans bears an expression of bland hopefulness, as though he expects the war to be called off as a mistake any minute now, and I'm sorry, but GI Joe with Kung-Fu Grip had more convincing hands than any of them.

Well, maybe they really are thought-provoking. Just not in the way they hoped.