Night Owl Cards

  Hooooooooooooooooo! It's your favorite cardboard-collecting owl's designated holiday! Who decided I'd rather scare kiddies from tree tops instead of page binders inside a well-lit card rooooooooooooom? Who? Who? Was it the same person who decided airing Game 6 of the World Series on a major holiday was a good idea? Who? Who?   When you think about it, Halloween is trooooooooooly the oddball holiday on the calendar when it comes to major U.S. holidays. Almost every other holiday has to do with family, country or religion. Halloween covers a couple of those elements but only tangentially and only if you have little tykes trudging outside in the rain and wind and cold while they beg for gooooooooooooodies.   So on this oddball holiday I have some gooooooooodies of my own -- the cardboard kind -- that arrived on this festive day. They happen to be oddballs, tooooooooooooo! In keeping with the season.     Ooooooooooooo. One of the last remaining 1971 Fleer World Se...

  Happy Halloween to those who celebrate, and that's a whole bunch, as I've never seen more Halloween lights displays in my entire life. Somebody is making a lot of money. I've posted off-and-on for the holiday, depending on my schedule (and whether I'm fending off kiddies at the front door). In the early days of this blog, myself and others might try to dig up an orange baseball card for the occasion. You remember when all you could find to represent the night of ghouls and goblins was a lousy 1988 Donruss Baseball's Best or some random orange parallel? Heck, it's all I could find last year . Well, Topps has you covered this year. For its Update set, which often comes out around Halloween (but not always), Topps has issued Panini-like parallels with Halloween themes. The background for individual players' cards have been replaced by dancing ghosts , Jack-o-Lanterns , black cats and other spookies. (They remind me of the Peanuts special ). There are also pl...

(Happy Halloween! The work schedule dictates whether I'll be dealing with this holiday or not. This year I am not. So the day really is happy! ... Well, except for the work part. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 314th in a series): On the years I post on Halloween, I try to have a theme. There have been several over the life of this blog . Tonight, all I have is an orange card. Real original, I know. But at least it's an unusual orange card. This is what's called a "logofractor." I know some of you don't know what that is. But when they were released about a month ago -- boxes contained five packs of regular 2022 Chrome cards and two packs of logofractors -- it seemed like everyone knew. The hype machine was in full spew. Collectors -- you know the ones -- couldn't get enough of them. My timeline was filled with gushing. Some of the cards were selling in four figures. All because of the MLB logo plastered across the image. Topps has...

Big day tomorrow. A full slate of football to watch as usual, plus Game 5 of the World Series and ... oh, yeah, we're supposed to hand out candy to kids for four hours.   Halloween on a Sunday means I can't hide behind my "I have to work" excuse for avoiding the parade of urchins scrambling up my porch. I like the little dudes (except the ones who yank the door open), there's just so many of them. I think that's how it will happen anyway. With last year's COVID Halloween, it's difficult to know what to expect. But I'm anticipating many candy addicts. As I've mentioned before, people come in from the country, park their tractors on the street and send the kids out to demand treats from suburbanites. So between sports and squirts -- and no daughter around to do our door-attendant bidding -- I'll be too busy to blog tomorrow. This is my Halloween post. I remember well being a kid on Halloween, carting an orange plastic pumpkin around. My main ...

    Happy Halloween on what could be a scarier holiday than usual. Everyone have their candy shoot affixed to the porch railing?   As I've mentioned before, Halloween is usually a very busy time in my neighborhood, but we're not expecting nearly as much activity tonight. I have to work anyway.   For this year's Halloween post, and to add my second Save Second Base post on the final day of October, I have this pink card that came with a few cards that I picked up for mere dimes several months ago. I knew nothing about Vampirella until I came across these cards. I'm not much of a comic nerd. I'm definitely not a horror nerd. And combining the two usually isn't going to get me to buy anything.   But I do make an exception for sexily drawn women in skimpy outfits. I can't help it. Vampirella is made the way she is. I'm made the way I am.   The cards I found are from a 1995 Topps set called "Visions of Vampirella". Getting information about this s...

I've never liked horror movies or comics, I just can't handle them. But growing up, the usual classic monsters were everywhere. Old black-and-white Frankenstein movies would appear on TV on Saturday afternoons, and Dracula always creeped me out. Plus, we had our own cereals with Frankenstein (Frankenberry) and Dracula (Count Chocula) on the box cover. But I just couldn't get into that -- those people monsters. The beast-themed monsters were much more cool -- King Kong and especially Godzilla. I liked watching those movies. And that's why the Wolfman somewhat appealed to me. As a youngster, I feared dogs. But I liked them, too. I wanted to get close to them, but I was afraid. I saw that appeal, that fear in the Wolfman. The Wolfman was everywhere when I was a kid and a young teenager. Of course, Wolfman Jack still dominated the radio, even in the '70s and '80s as oldies stations popped up after his appearance in "American Graffiti." I...