Night Owl Cards

A couple of months ago I speculated that I would complete the 2012 Allen and Ginter set earlier than any of the previous four A&G sets that I have completed. Thanks to some beneficial trade packages that took out a bunch of wants late this summer, I was down to a few cards in no time. But, of course, SPs have a way of extending every completion goal into a bloody, death march. It's like the Fear Factor with cards. YOU WILL COMPLETE THIS SET AFTER YOU RUN THROUGH THIS OBSTACLE COURSE LITTERED WITH BEAR TRAPS, HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR 10 MINUTES WHILE SUBMERGED UNDERWATER IN A VW BUG, AND EAT 29 LIVE LARVAE OF THE EASTERN EYED CLICK BEETLE! THEN, and only THEN, can you complete your set! I'm not willing to do any of that. So here I still sit, two cards away from completion. A couple of people took pity on my cowardly ways and at least got me down to those two cards. Jeff from 2 by 3 Heroes sent me Carlos Pena and Buster Posey. Pena is a short-print but Posey i...

There are certain topics that circulate through the blogs over and over again. Sometimes the same topic comes in bunches, only to disappear for awhile, and then re-emerge a year or two later when new blogs start up. One of these topics is finding cards of players on teams for which you never knew they played. It pops up repeatedly. Jose Canseco as an Expo is often cited. Al Oliver as a Dodger is another one. There are probably many more that I forget. I decided to finally do a post on this, just to keep my blogger license. You have to write about this topic -- and players with goofy hair -- or "they" will come and find you and tell you can't waste your time rambling about cards anymore. I didn't have a lot of time to dig up cards, so I went directly to my Topps Traded sets, since that's where a lot of these examples occur. I don't have all the Traded sets, or even half of them -- including some pretty common issues, like from the late '80s. So I k...

I took care of some last minute ugliness before vacation began today. You've got to get it all out of the way so none of it will tarnish the freedom. One of those bits of ugly was visiting the dentist, which is a life ritual that always sucks. I did have my hopes, when I was a kid and I'd emerge in tears as the hygienist would hand over a container of animal erasers, in hopes that one of them would shut me up. I hoped, that like many things that I expected out of adulthood, it would become better when I was older. Kind of like how I noticed adults got to stay up as late as they wanted and eat chocolate anytime all the time. Surely, the dentist would be a lot better, right? Maybe with Adult Teeth, I'd never experience pain again. Well, that theory is out the window, just like many others formulated in my formative years. Ow. Fortunately, the vacation is one thing that is just as good as, if not better than, when I was a kid. And it starts now. I don't have a...