Night Owl Cards

When you sit and stare at a stack of cards, and then sit and stare at them again, and then sit and stare at them again , you eventually realize something about them. Some cards make me happy, some cards make me unhappy, and some cards, well, I just look at them and think "what's this supposed to be?" That's rather obvious, I guess, but I thought it was interesting that I could get all of that out of one stack of cards sent to me by Zippy Zappy Kenny from Cervin' Up Cards . I'll start with "happy" first because some people get through only the first few lines of a post and then are distracted by college football, or food, or going outside and actually living. Shallow people. Here is the happiest happy. It features the following happy elements: vintage, Brooklyn Dodger, card from the '50s, known baseball character, dude named "Preacher", card off my want list, and just the right amount of wear. Seven happy points for 1954...

There's been a lot of talk about age in the sports world lately. With the deaths of Bob Welch, Tony Gwynn and Chuck Noll, you've heard the following in casual conversations: "He was too young." "He lived a long and good life." "I'm not that much younger than he was." We are obsessed with age, which really means we are obsessed with death. And death is why we are very obsessed with youth. And by "we" I mean the whole damn nation, maybe the whole damn world. In case you haven't noticed, this is a youth-driven culture. Nobody reads anything, looks at anything, mentions anything unless it involves someone young: News break: 55-year-old woman robs bank with husband. Everyone: Meh. News break : 14-year-old girl robs bank while carrying 3-year-old she was babysitting. Everyone: Was she hot? This is the world in which we live. It is particularly apparent online. Check out virtually any news site that is not connecte...

(Greetings. Today is National Memo Day. The older I get, the more I celebrate this day. Right now, there are about four or five memos to myself at work, the same number to myself at home, and a couple more in my pocket. I suppose I could put all this stuff in my phone, but without having crinkly paper everywhere to see or touch, I'd probably forget half the reminders I put in the phone. Anyway, you didn't come to see old man ramblings. It's Cardboard Appreciation time! This is the 205th in a series): I saw this card on Cervin' Up Cards and I had to have it. Good ol' Zippy Zappy was great enough to send it to me. This card recognizes Yasiel Puig's walk-off home run in the 11th inning against the Reds to end what was a scoreless game last July. Puig, in his usual oversized zeal for everything, slid into home plate at the end of his trot. This set off outrage among the "play the game the right way" crowd, and I'll always remember it because ...

Here is another tale about my want list. It's a pretty thorough list. Maybe not as thorough as some, but more complete than others. Like I said a few posts ago, I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for updating it with all the parallel nonsense of 2014. But there is the other end of the spectrum, too. You won't find on my want list any cards from earlier than 1952. Why is that? Well, frankly, five-plus years into this blog, I'm still not over the fact that people send me cards. And it's that part of me that thinks it's a little presumptuous to even be listing 1952 and 1953 Topps, let alone stuff from what I consider to be the prehistoric era of cards. So, there isn't a want list for something like 1950 Bowman. Do I like 1950 Bowman? Sure! It's got Brooklyn Dodgers in it, don't it? But, really, nobody's going to send me those kind of cards. I received one surprise from Dave of Tribe Cards way way back when he sent me a 1950 Bowman ...