Hud Rockey blog.

A warm day! (In the 60s F.) A gift from benevolent weather gods, or prankster ones who’ll slam us real good in a few weeks or even days.

We share offices with the Midwest reps of New York magazine, and they get a lot of other NY-focused pubs in the mail, including The New York Post, the tabloid of record. It had the photo of the smoking GI as page one -- a fine piece of photojournalism. It doesn’t take much poking around the Web to find out that predictable sentiments have already emerged regarding that spike of tobacco in Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller’s mouth, pro and con. I say, nominate the photographer, Luis Sinco of the Los Angeles Times, for a Pulitzer.

During the same mail delivery, we got a bit of direct mail advertising from American Express addressed to one Hud Rockey in our building and suite. Now there’s a name in the Dash Riprock tradition of pseudonyms. We have no idea how Amex’s computers, or the computers that their computers consulted, or even more distant computers, generated this particular name for us, but I like to think that somewhere a data-entry person adds a bit of spice to her tiresome job by throwing in made-up names occasionally. But it’s probably not like that.

The ad, by the way, touts a “Business Capital Line” in big letters: $10,000 TO $100,000… NO COLLATERAL REQUIRED… 100% AVAILABLE IMMEDIATE AS CASH… Heh-heh. Off to Rio! Good thing I’m reasonably honest, but everyone ought to have a touch of fantasy-larceny in his heart, if only to add a moment of levity to the day. It's probably harder than it sounds to take advantage of something like that, too.