Night Owl Cards

  The other day on Twitter a collector mentioned that he was attempting to trade with someone from every state in the U.S. That immediately caused me to remember the trade map. Perhaps if you were around in 2012 -- I mean on the blogs -- you would remember the trade map, too. That's the last time I featured it. And the time before that was all the way back in 2010! You see, I too was trying to trade with someone from every state. Then crushing apathy killed the dream, so definitively that I haven't thought about the trade map for years. When I last showed it, I had just cleared Delaware and Nevada off my state trade list. That's the map I showed on Sept. 28, 2012. The blue states all include trade buddies. I had traded with collectors in 40 states at that point. That's when I stopped paying attention. But when the other 50-state chaser mentioned his quest on Twitter, I pulled out this old map and mentioned how close I had gotten. That caused others to say, "Hey! I...

Today is National Left-Handers' Day . As a left-hander all of my life, I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know there was a day reserved for me. And that they've been doing it since 1976. I thought of a way that I could make it up to myself, and of course those thoughts involve the blog and baseball cards. But before I get to that, a little perspective on life as a lefty. As you might have heard, it's not easy -- obnoxious right-handed desks in school, getting pen marks on your hand every time you write, operating a mouse on the right-handed side because we wouldn't dare subject a right-hander to using their left hand when operating the computer. In school the teacher would pull a container filled with scissors and distribute them to the kids during whatever scissor-cutting exercise was taking place. If I was very lucky -- and by "lucky" I mean maybe once every other year -- I'd find a pair of left-handed scissors. And then I remember one t...