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Brooks Peterson
Monday, March 19, 2001
WD-40 fans celebrate slippery stuff
Journalism is a business populated by hard-boiled,wise-cracking cynics. Any expert - which is to say, anybody who's seen "The Front Page" - could tell you that. Yessir, we're skeptics by inclination, doubters by necessity.
And yet . . . there are moments when even the crankiest of wordsmiths cannot but stand in child-like awe of the ineffably mysterious, ultimately impenetrable workings of a beneficent Providence.
Let me set the stage for you: The hollow-eyed NewsWretch is rapidly running out of week. The insatiable, gaping maw of the Metropolitan Daily demands . . . fodder. Grist. Copy. The ol' Monday column, to be precise.
We've walked this weary way many a time, o reader mine. You weren't aware of it, but there you were at my elbow, demanding to be Entertained. Pixillated. Enlightened. Something. I could feel that trusting, expectant gaze of yours, working on my conscience . . . and burning a hole through my cranium. Are you gonna let me down this week?
There was a column out there - there's always a column out there - but it was an elusive devil. And then, by chance (you think? I wonder), I swung by my mailbox in the newsroom and plucked out . . .
A press release from the WD-40 Company. You know: WD-40 - the odd-smelling stuff you spray on creaky hinges, rusted bolts, squeaky springs.
So? So this: WD-40 now has its own fan club: a band of carbon-based life forms linked by their appreciation of and their commitment to . . . WD-40.
Hey, the numbers don't lie. When the company staged a Search for 2000 Uses Sweepstakes, it got 300,000 responses. The WD-40 Fan Club (www.wd40.com) was the obligatory next step.
Suddenly the scene is bathed in ethereal light: Are we onto something here? Is humanity poised on the brink of a whole new range of passionate attachments to objects and substances we once considered so humdrum as not to warrant a second glance?
Think about it. One candidate leaps immediately to mind: An entire subculture has sprung up around duct tape. There is even a kind of duct tape chic: T-shirts and sweatshirts proclaim the wearer to be a duct tape kind of guy. Suddenly, you're not just another schnook trying to improvise a temporary fix with that sticky, silvery stuff. Nossir: You're a citizen of Duct Tape Nation.
How about SPAM - the once-scorned luncheon meat that has now attained the trappings of a cult phenomenon? In addition to its website (inevitably, www.SPAM.com), there's the fan club and a vast array of fan gear. Want a SPAM bowling shirt? Done. How about glow-in-the-dark SPAM boxer shorts. Gotcha covered, literally and figuratively.
What's next? I've got a couple of nominees - the first at once modern and reassuringly low-tech; the other cruelly and (in this man's opinion) unjustly consigned to oblivion.
In an age of e-mail and instantaneous but ephemeral communication, I find Post-Its - the little sticky tear-off notes that have become omnipresent in commerce, academia and millions of households - deeply reassuring. Clever, but comprehensible. How many things can you say that about these days? Post-It zealots, sign up here for . . . oh, say . . . origami with Post-Its. Sky-diving with parachutes fashioned entirely of Post-Its. Bikinis made of Post-Its. (No, Hollywood's probably done that already.) When the going gets sticky . . .
As for the other, well, call me a nostalgist, but I have yet to get over the disappearance of Ko-Rec-Type. Remember? Those were the little 2-by-3-inch film sheets you placed over mistakes made while tapping something out on your typewriter. You typed over the mistake, and thanks to the powdery stuff on the business side of the film, your error disappeared. Sort of. Vastly preferable to the liquid stuff.
Computer printers and word processors doomed Ko-Rec-Type. But that's no reason the clans shouldn't be laying the foundations for Ko-Rec-Type - The Return.
Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com
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© 2001 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a
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