Night Owl Cards

I just got back from a quick jaunt to my folks' house to continue with the never-ending clearing out process. What a project. When I returned and walked through the door this afternoon, the mail from the last two days was sitting on the computer desk. It contained two pieces of junk mail and five -- five! -- envelopes containing cards. Five! For a moment I was transported to 2010 when that kind of card bounty was a semi-regular occurrence. To what did I owe the cardboard pleasure? Back in those days, I was so buried in cards from others that sometimes I had to feature more than one card package in the same post. I haven't done that for a long time. But I'm doing it here now. Because my brain is a bit fried from a long drive. This will be quick though. I'm showing only three of them and two of the envelopes contained just one card and the other contained two. Each, however, is quite interesting in its own right. OK: The first card arrived from Peter...

Team collectors: do you find that trying to complete your team sets is getting more difficult? I was feeling pretty good about where I was already with the Dodgers I had accumulated from this year's Allen & Ginter product. With 10 cards down and five inserts landed, I figured I was getting pretty close to finishing it off. Wrong. This year's A&G set happens to include more Dodgers base cards than in any other previous A&G set. There are 17 of them, so I'm barely halfway there. You may chalk this up to the Dodgers showing up in the World Series. But the Dodgers are one of the most popular teams in sports so there's always going to be plentiful cards in each Topps set. I just didn't expect to be so far behind when I thought I was way ahead. I decided to look back on past A&G sets to see how many Dodgers showed up in the base set each year. It turned out it wasn't exactly a straight line going up. 2006: 9 2007: 10 2008: 16 2009: 12...

I have "watched" this year's postseason without a working television. In fact, tonight is the first night in which I'll be able to actually see and hear what everyone else is seeing and hearing, images of and commentary about players at the ballpark doing extraordinary things. This has happened because I got myself so twisted over my cable box -- and the new and different box the cable company gave to me -- that they finally had to send a tech guy out to save me. And he also fixed a few more things for me (at no charge, I made sure of that), and now my techy things are working better than ever. I got into this situation because I'm a low-tech guy and I don't really have the knowledge or right kind of brain to operate in what's increasingly an exclusively high-tech world. I turned toward writing at an early age because I knew, after trying and failing in a new world called "computer science," that I was much better at the arts than the sc...

Today is National Left Handers Day. As a proud lefty, I feel it's my duty to post something leftyish on this day. Two of the last three years, I have. One was well-received. Another , which I might add involved a fair amount of time-consuming research, was not. Today there is no time for research. But there is time for something that I noticed that was interesting -- to me, anyway. Pat from Hot Corner Cards sent me some Dodgers in an effort to coerce a card out of me. This is always an acceptable procedure. As I often do, I separate the cards out of the envelope into ones I need and ones I don't. ("Need" is a subjective word in the hobby and sometimes I "need" cards I have already). The cards I needed were 1974 Topps Billy Buck up there -- a lefty through and through ... ... and this 2015 Archives card of Adrian Gonzalez, also a full-time lefty ... ... and this 2015 Allen and Ginter card of Hyun-Jin Ryu, who is actually showing you tha...

Since we're " stealing " post titles now, I figured I'd steal one myself, but put a little bit of a twist on it. I grew up in a household where "hate" was considered a terribly strong word reserved for the most evil of entities, and the word "stupid" was banned altogether. I considered this "stupid" because the kids I knew were saying words far worse than "stupid," although I can see my mother's point all these years later. However, that hasn't stopped me. The word "stupid" has appeared on this blog in 288 posts. The word "hate" has appeared in 775 posts. I hate like hell that I've used the word "hate" that much, but I'd like to believe that the vast majority of hate references were in regard to my opinion of cards. Not that this makes sense to my mom or anyone who considers these things merely cardboard pictures of men, but "hate" seems to do an adequate job hig...

For those of you who haven't been reading this blog for more than one or two years, you may not know that I once collected stamps. Stamps are one of three Very Serious collections in my life. Matchbox cars came first, then stamps, then baseball cards. I've addressed all of this before -- matchboxes, here , and stamps, here . In between there were bottle caps and coins and magazines and stuffed animals and records and rocks on the beach. I've addressed this, too, in something called subliminal collecting . But only Matchbox cars, stamps and baseball cards ever received any kind of dedication, what probably could be called "vices" considering how much time I spent with them. Not long ago, I received a PWE from 2-by-3 Heroes that contained two of those three collecting vices. No, silly, you can't fit a Matchbox car in a PWE. I'm talking about ... STAMPS plus CARDS!!! Stamps are still pretty cool, although I barely think about the...

There are a few ways to my collecting heart. 1970s cards. Minis. Dodgers, of course. Combine all three and you've made a friend for life. But this isn't the only path to gratitude. Take a recent package that I received from Alan, who dropped me an appreciated note about how he has returned to collecting and enjoys my blog. He had some cards for me that didn't fit his collection but thought they might fit mine. The cards couldn't have been more on the fringe of what I collect. The Hyun-Jin Ryu card that you see here is one of only three received that actually features a Dodgers logo. A lot of the cards are the first of their kind in my collection. Yet, every single one of them are connected to the Dodgers in some way. Like I said, there isn't just one path. Intrigued? You should be. This is one of the most interesting card packages I've received in a long time. Get ready to learn something. I'll start with the only other Dodger you...

Look at that card. Isn't it gorgeous? Oh, sure, some of you might consider it boring. It's not boring. It's the opposite of boring. It's elegant. It's classic. It's simple in the most wonderful way. Oh, and it's also Gypsy Queen. Yeah, I'm calling a Gypsy Queen card "gorgeous". I'll get to that. This card was sent to me by JediJeff at 2 by 3 Heroes . Since I am going out of my way to avoid Gypsy Queen this year, I had no idea what it was. I looked it up and determined that it was an insert in the GQ set. It's called an N174 insert, and it's based on a set from 1888. This, my fellow collectors, is what Gypsy Queen should be. I know that would mean that we couldn't call it "Gypsy Queen," we'd have to call it "N174," and that's a horrible name if you're trying to get anyone to buy your product. But I don't care, man. Put away that box of ugly you've been throwing at us for fo...