Night Owl Cards

Even though I don't kill my own dinner, drive a pickup with the tailpipe cut off to wake up every last person, or punctuate each sentence with "what-not," I'm your basic red-blooded American male. I like meat. I like girls. I like baseball. Most of my tastes are fairly basic and mainstream, especially when it comes to baseball. I follow the major leagues. And I'll go to a minor league game. Everything else, well, it just muddies the situation. I don't have time for it. I collect the same way -- in other words, baseball players I've heard of, please. But there are those who try to take me out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I go along for the ride, sometimes I hide under the covers until they go away. Recently, the operator of Torren' Up Cards , dropped another Zippy Zapping on me. As you know, ZZ likes cards that fly off my radar. Some I am aware of but generally ignore. Others I've heard of, but only because there are blogs like Torren...

As a guy, there are certain words I never say. It's not like I go out of my way to avoid them. It's just that I don't know why I'd ever have the occasion to use them and actually never even think to use them. For example, "delectable." When in the hell would I ever use that word in public? It's so foreign to me that I just had to look up how it's spelled. I know what it means, but honestly, why use such a freakish word when "tasty" or, um, "good" would work just as well? Along those lines is the word "delicious," a word that I use only -- forever and ever -- to describe food. I will never use it to describe anything else and I get a piercing pain directly above my right eye when anyone uses the word to describe other things. But something strange comes over me when it comes to baseball cards. Words that I never use often pop into my head the minute I see a certain card. It's like that word is the only word tha...

As a team collector, I've already written off current sets as something I can complete. There's no way I will get all of the Dodgers from sets that are issued today. It's a parallel-insert-SP insanity world, and until it all blows up, I will never be able to cross off the last card and exclaim "DONE!" It's been that way for a number of years now, which is why team collectors make little deals with themselves -- "OK, I'll collect the whole non-parallel set and I'll be finished" -- to keep from going broke and insane. I have no hope of finishing off the Dodger team sets from probably the last 20 years. I'm not going to even try. Oh, sure, I'll act like I'm trying by obtaining all the cards I can from the mid-1990s through the present, but really, I'm not trying. Ignore that happy tune that I'm singing. The lyrics are dark, dark. For real hope of completing team sets, I have to go to the cards of my childhood, some o...