Night Owl Cards

The glory days of Kellogg's 3-D cards took place from 1970-83. That was when Kellogg's was issuing a new set each year, usually available off the side or the back of a cereal box and often with a single card from that set swimming in cereal inside the box. My period of collecting Kellogg's 3-D cards is much shorter than that. The first 3-D cards I remember seeing are from 1974, but I don't recall fishing any out of a box of Frosted Flakes until 1977. The peak years for me and Kellogg's cards was 1977-80 -- that was when my brothers and I ordered an entire set off of the box and then divided the cards among ourselves. I hold great affection for Kellogg's cards from that 77-80 era. I also am enamored with the 3-D cards from 1974-76. And I hold much respect for the early Kellogg's cards from 1970-73, even the 2-D set from '73. That leaves 1981-83, a period when I left Kellogg's cards behind (no doubt the arrival of Donruss and Fleer had somethi...

When I first started attending college in Buffalo in the mid-1980s, I was charmed by a number of Buffalo-centric pastimes, one of which was watching television the way only someone from Buffalo can. Buffalo is close to Canada so there was plenty of Canadian programming available. But Buffalo also featured an independent station called WUTV-29. This station aired a variety of entertainment programming that mostly included cartoons, old television show reruns and old movies and science fiction shows. It was both wonderfully off the beaten path and comfortably familiar. Later in the '80s, WUTV became affiliated with Fox programming and, then, UPN. It's a Fox affiliate now, I believe. I haven't watched the channel since I moved away from Buffalo, but I think, while the station still offers some charm, it is not the independent wonder it once was. It was the little things on that channel that brought me back to watching Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s. The fact...

I want to commend Steve of Collating Cards for surrendering his Braves fandom to follow the Mariners. As a card blogger and trader of relatively limited means, I know there is no end to the demand for Braves cards. Yet finding someone to take your Mariners cards may be an even more difficult task than keeping Braves cards in stock. This is a wise move, and just to show how serious he is, Steve recently sent me a bunch of Braves cards from the 1973 Topps set that I have just started collecting (he also added the rogue '75-themed Dave Justice that I believe came from an early '90s Baseball Cards magazine). When I looked through the cards he sent, I realized that it was practically the entire team set. The only cards that were missing were the two Hank Aarons. Well -- ha! -- I picked up the Aaron base card at a card show last September. And for purposes of this blog post, the other Aaron -- part of the All-Time Leaders subset -- doesn't qualify for inclusion in the...

I am in a constant fight with myself over what to absorb into my brain. As a member of the media, I have always tried to gather as much information as I could for myself. You should have seen me in college. This was before the internet, but I had subscriptions to several different current events magazines, made daily visits to the library to consume even more information, and constantly monitored the TV news. As I became more settled and the world seemed to get more alarming, I started to change my philosophy. Too much information wasn't good for my health. And I could see it wasn't good for others either. That's never more apparent than it is now. And although "outta sight, outta mind" seems like a flippant excuse for sticking your head in the sand, it has served me well. I've gone back to that reminder again lately. I will focus on what I can see and affect where I live. My hope is others do the same, make the right decisions, and stop themselves from...