Night Owl Cards

I just came back from a visit to my beloved Buffalo. There is so much I want to do there, but since much of my family -- on both sides -- lives there, I  mostly spent a lot of time catching up. Nothing wrong with that, but it limits the Buffalo things you can do. I wanted to go back to the antique place I saw in a mall during my visit last year. There were a lot of cards there but I was caught off-guard. Totally prepared this time, I was underwhelmed with this visit. There was hardly any vintage, way too much football and junk wax galore. Also, the following annoyed me: A lot of the cards were under glass, so you'd have to find someone to ask to look at them. Particularly annoying is there were multiple dollar boxes under glass. Meanwhile, not far away, were comic books for a dollar each that I could touch and manhandle all I wanted. Come on sellers, stop it. I walked out of there with nothing. I had planned to buy a couple '70s albums (so many great cheap ones) to go with my c...

 (The final battle to reach the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame is going on right now! Have you voted? If not, please vote in the poll by copy-and-pasting this link: https://vote.easypolls.net/62e4287f8d4471006256dcda . I probably will be badgering you about this all week).    I went to Buffalo for a couple of days to visit family last week. It's really my favorite place in all of the world and the wife and I actually had the first of what will probably be a few conversations about retiring there someday.   There is so much that I want to do there when I go, but I don't get to do even one-quarter of it, because I never have much time and family takes up most of it.   But I did manage to stop by Dave & Adam's this time around.   Dave & Adam's is a major online card collecting presence and has been for years and years. It was born right in Buffalo with a small card shop in the early 1990s. I had moved out of Buffalo by that point and didn't actual...

    Those of you who know what this sign means know both where I was the last couple of days and what quality food is.   John & Mary's has been a sub sandwich institution in Buffalo for 70 years, the first restaurant was opened exactly 70 years ago at the site of this very picture that I took on Harlem Road in the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga. My folks used to talk fondly about John & Mary's when I was a kid and every once in a while on our trips to Buffalo, we'd stop for lunch at one of the locations, usually outside the city. When I started going to college in Buffalo, John & Mary's was one of the only places that I knew that was neither fast food nor dorm food. So I'd go to the Sheridan Drive location quite a bit. A year or two later, I met a girl. Wouldn't you know, she knew about John & Mary's. Even better, her home was mere blocks from the original J & M's! Jackpot! I can't tell you how many take-out dinners came from the p...

(Welcome all to National Absurdity Day, celebrated every November 20th. I can't think of anything more absurd than the kids in town already using up two snow days before December hits. It's bundle-up-with-your-baseball-cards weather! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 216th in a series): I miss Buffalo. I get sideways looks when I say that in front of people who have never lived there. But the ones who have ... and have left ... and have spent years figuring out a way to get back ... know what I mean. Buffalo is more than snow and hapless sports teams. It's the location for some of the greatest times of my life. Of a lot of people's lives. That's why I got a little sad when I saw the regurgitation of epic Buffalo snow photos across the internet accompanied by this tag line: "be glad you don't live in Buffalo." This was written by someone who obviously never spent more than an airport layover in the city (which, by the way, isn...