Night Owl Cards

   Among the large cities in Upstate New York, Syracuse is the one that I drive through the most. But it's not a destination city like Buffalo or Albany. It's a place where I brave the traffic on the way to somewhere else.   The only two exceptions are to watch minor league baseball or go to a card show. It's the closest large city to me so it does have its perks. But I don't know it very well. So when I realized there was a show coming up and that it was corresponding with a major highway renovation project in central Syracuse, I was concerned.   The normal route to the show at the fairgrounds would take me directly into detours, one-lane traffic and potential gridlock and confusion. I had to find an alternate route, in a city I don't know. Through years of self-navigation, in cities much larger than this, I've never relied on GPS. I thought this might be the time I'd need it. I activated it but never turned it on. In fact, I think I might have found a new ...

  I've been writing this blog for a decade-and-a-half (another anniversary coming up soon), and I have received my share of RAKs and plain monster boxes that blow RAKs out of the stratosphere. It's the nature of the generosity of the blogs over the years (sorry, former Twitter, you can't compete with what came before you) and, in general, the generosity of collectors.   But I admit I've been treated extra-special. I'm probably spoiled. When I'm looking for cards, people reach out. Recently it's been 2023 Heritage and several have responded. I've been corresponding with one Heritage trader online and I told him I'd have to wait a couple days and sort out what people are offering and he made a comment about how "Everybody loves (night owl)". Well, not everybody , but I do have connections after all this time.   I won't apologize for it. I'm not writing to get cards, but if people want to send me cards for writing words, hell, I will t...

I recently received some cards from two different blogging buds. The envelopes from each featured vastly different cards, but there was one thing in common with both of them. First the cards from Daniel of It's Like Having My Own Card Shop (come back to your blog, Daniel!)     Many of the cards he sent that I needed were shiny -- I mean super-shiny, like that Puig example.   OK, that one isn't shiny, just mini.   But these are shiny and they are also cards that are the theme of the post title. They will not stay flat. I could place them under a large box filled with my Dodgers dupes for six months and they still wouldn't be as flat as your average card. And you know what, it doesn't bother me much -- in this example. I  will put them in a binder and they won't warp the pages, so it's all cool. I will always give a pass to something in pretty colors. The other envelope was from J...

When I was a kid, my brother and a couple of friends of ours would pretend we were radio hosts. As kids from the '70s, the best way to do that was to use your parents' cassette recorder (the one with the carrying handle with the big buttons in the front). And to jazz up your recordings, every once in awhile we would record what we heard on the radio and mix it in with what we said. The way we did this was to push the cassette recorder as close to the radio speaker as possible. We thought this was the height of innovation and we were quite proud of our work. We'd listen to those tapes over and over. One time, one of us said something into the recorder and added "let's see what the man on the street has to say." Then we turned on the radio and recorded the first words we heard. Those words were "it's the spice of life." That threw us into hysterics. Absolute hysterics. Imagine two boys and two girls, ranging from age 8 to 12, lying on the ...