Cloning road-worn hope
If you’re like me, every glance at the headlines this past week was just one more stomach-turning journey to terror and back.
Layoffs, water shortages, IOUs coming from the state: it just didn’t seem to end, didn’t it?
But I have hope. I have hope because I saw the following story on the wire in the midst of my despair:
“A Boca Raton, Fla. couple got a new dog, and it's just like their old dog,” stated a portion of the Associated Press story released Thursday. “Not just the same breed and gender, but the same DNA. Nina and Edgar Otto picked up their cloned yellow lab puppy at the Miami International Airport Monday night. Lancelot Encore was cloned from the DNA of the Ottos' late dog Lancelot, which died of cancer in January 2008.”
And why does this give me hope? Keep reading:
“Guessing that pet cloning would one day be possible, the Ottos had DNA samples of their dog frozen five years ago,” stated the story. “The Ottos paid $155,000 in a San Francisco biotech firm's dog-cloning auction last July. BioArts International created Lancelot Encore in South Korea, where he was born 10 weeks ago. The Ottos say he's the first single-birth, commercially cloned puppy in the United States.”
The fact that people are still willing to pay for completely non-essential items like cloned pets signals to me that we may make it out of this thing yet. Say what you want about the Great Depression, even if they had the technology to clone I doubt people would have stepped out of the bread lines long enough to even think about throwing money at such things.
But in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s economic downturn? You’d better believe they’d be cloning things left and right if they got their glittery hands on that technology. And that’s what I feel like we’re going through right now.
And just when I thought this story was the exception that proved the rule, I found out the next day that Fender Guitars has released a new series of “Road Worn” guitars. The part of this equation that caught my attention was the fact that Fender was banking on the fact that people would be willing to throw down extra money to have their new guitars look like someone had played the stuffing out of them.
“Some things get better with age and Fender knows it,” read the product’s description on the Web site proguitarshop.com. “That’s why we are proud to introduce the new Fender Road Worn Guitars for 2009. These guitars are perfectly aged for that broken in feel and look. The vibe from these guitars is unmistakably cool like that old Chevy Nova parked in the garage. The Fender Road Worn guitars look, feel, and play like they have been on stage for 40 years with fretboard wear, arm wear on the finish, and aged hardware and pickups. Pick one up and it feels like your best friend.”
Why bother actually putting in the work required to make the instrument look worn when you can buy your new best friend pre-damaged? Win-win, right?
“When your fingers come to rest on the strings they feel like they have been there for years,” the description continues. “Every detail and nuance of the Road Worn guitars is reminiscent of the bygone days when rock was rock and scars were proudly displayed as a badge of experience...The Fender Road Worn guitars are lovingly distressed (aged) in order to create a guitar with a particular vibe and feel. Sometimes a brand new guitar just doesn’t sound or feel right until it’s had a beer spilled on it or has been dropped on the floor.”
Yes, we are still America where sometimes we want our new products to look like they’ve been used even when buying something that’s actually pre-owned might be cheaper and have actual blemishes.
See? It can’t be all bad!
On the off chance that those two pieces of information don’t cheer you up, here’s something I just read today in a Fortune Magazine story entitled “Crisis into opportunity” in which management guru Jim Collins explains why now is no time for self-pity.
“I don't care how hard this period is,” reads the last line of the interview. “You have to have the combination of believing that you will prevail, that you will get out of this, but also not be the Pollyanna who ignores the brutal facts. You have to say that we will be in this for a long time and we will turn this into a defining event, a big catalyst to make ourselves a much stronger enterprise. Our characters are being forged in a burning, searing crucible.”