Night Owl Cards

The number of colored parallels reached a new high (or low) in 2014. Just in Topps retail alone there was Target red, Walmart blue, Toys R Us purple, hanger pack green, hanger box yellow, hanger box orange, any-kind-of-pack red foil, and good-luck-finding-any pink, black and camo. It's really gotten out of hand and I'm not the only one to have said this fifty eleven times. But I'll say one thing for all the parallels: at least cards are colorful again. There was The Dark Period -- some call it the 1990s -- when cards weren't all that colorful (Finest and Circa were exceptions). Oh sure, the pictures were full-bleed and the photographs were as clear as all get-out, but I grew up in a land of colorful photography. I need more than a picture. I need crazy multi-color borders. I need electric graphics. Some '90s sets tried to entice collectors with over-the-top names that implied glorious color. One of those deceivers is the 1994 Stadium Club parallels. They we...

All right, I didn't get much response from yesterday's post, so I'm not going to believe anybody ever again when they cry about how kids don't collect anymore. I showed you that they did and obviously it's not that interesting to you. Granted, you might need to have kids and have been collecting for quite awhile to appreciate what the big deal was. So I thought I'd write about something else -- to which almost every male can relate: Babes. Yeah, you're interested now, huh? All I have to do is flash a picture of a pretty girl. I can read you like USA Today. Max from Starting Nine sent me another card package recently. He does a good job of finding stuff that I like and need. I've written plenty about that and you'll see those cards in a minute. But he also does a pretty good job of finding a pretty woman for me now and then. Yes, I'm happily married, and, no, he's not sending me actual women , no need to panic. But this doesn...

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but wearing the same shirt five days in a row just because your favorite team won the first time you wore it, isn't going to cause the team to keep winning. Neither is turning the TV off when your team isn't doing well and then turning it on again hoping that their fortunes have magically changed. You can sit in the same place in the living room to watch the game for 14 straight days and it's still not going to yield 14 straight victories for your team. No matter what you do, no matter how much you believe it, no matter how often it appears to work, there is one thing for certain: You have no effect on your favorite sports team. I know, because I've done most of the above and several other tactics, including drinking "magical" potions and watching the game upside down (I've probably done both at the same time). And it doesn't work. Your favorite team is going to screw up ... eventually. Yet, we p...