Rocktober? Surely, you’ve heard this term before.
   
    If you stay in Miami at the Eden Roc Hotel you know for the entire month they have a promotion called, oh, let’s see… Roctober?
    If you’re in Sussex County, Delaware, you just had the RockTOBER Fishing Festival.

    If you’ve ever stayed at a Hard Rock Hotel or ate at a Hard Rock Café during the month of … er… October, you know they call it ROCKTOBER!!

    If you ever listened to New York radio station Q104.3, you know for the entire month they call it “Rocktober!!” “You’re listening to Q104.3, your station during the month of Rocktober. Hey, Jack what time is it?”
    “It’s Rocktober Time, Sal. And we’re rocking with the Animal Collective tomorrow night
because, Sal, it’s ROCKTOBER!!”  
    “I can’t hear you, Jack!”
    “I said its ROCKTOBER, Sal.”
    “Well, are you ready to rock?”

    That above bit of radio patter which is, by the way, repeated by 20,000 classic rock stations all over the land may be coming to an end. No more of Jack and Sal’s bantering between the days of October 1st to Halloween unless… they wish to pay the Colorado Rockies big bucks for the rights to say Rocktober.

    Yeah, the Colorado Rockies, the Rox… the previously called hottest team in the playoffs (before the World Series) filed applications with the U.S. Trademark Office on October 4th to have exclusive rights to the name Rocktober on stuffed animals, Christmas stockings, T-Shirts, bobble-head dolls and the like. This filing came two days after Colorado Governor Bill Ritter declared October to be known as Rocktober. I’m not sure what they claim their basis for the name but we hear they feel they’re entitled ever since they discovered teams still play baseball in October. 

    This is the first time they’ve done it, that play baseball in October thing, and their name is the Rockies so it’s like “Hey, Rocktober sounds like a good name. We bet nobody else has ever used THAT term before.” 

    Some fans, justifiably excited about making the World Series, but wishing they could have at least won one game,  have tempered their desire to own this term. They think possibly the Rockies should like play in October TWICE before applying for a trademark? Twice would be nice, some say. Other fans are a little less subtle about jumping into a Rocktober trademark, saying things like “Hey, you never applied for the trademark ‘Sucktember’ when most years …”

    Don’t expect the Rockies path to ownership of this term to be a smooth road. In fact it might be a … um… a…different kind of road. (I don’t want Baskin Robbins suing me). There’s the computer game Activision which filed for the trademark “Legends of Rocktober.” There’s already a website from San Francisco that has been in existence for years named www.rocktober.com.  And, of course, there’s those pesky Classic Rock radio stations who, for  twenty-five years, never thought it necessary to trademark a term every competitor was using. Do you think they may have some kind of association interested in keeping a baseball team out of their playhouse? We’re looking at the weepy eyes of Jack and Sal, soulful but a little crusty.