Night Owl Cards

Here's some branding news for the blog: Night Owl Cards has its own business cards! The business cards feature the new logo for Night Owl Cards. I'll probably periodically distribute these with trades so I can look a bit more professional than the traditional "scrawled-on-a-cut-up-piece-of-paper" notes that I've been using for the last decade. The cards look particularly sweet, I think, because, like the logo, it was designed by my daughter, who is a college graphic design major. You should have seen me stumbling along with my business-card graphic concept until she took it over and devised something waaaaaaaay better almost instantaneously. Like all good two-dimensional cards, the business cards have informational backs, as well. That's everything you need to know when dealing with me. My primary objective with the cards was simply to get the logo some publicity. Since Blogger makes it difficult to present the new NOC logo front-and-cente...

So, it's the day after Christmas and what did I get? That's all you want to know, right? Well, I think you know my situation enough to know that there's no money to blow on hobby boxes or expensive hits. That was especially true this year when we decided to dedicate Christmas fund money to home improvements. That meant a lot less for individual gifts. But the good news is that finally -- what's this, year four that I've been begging my family for cards? -- the majority of my gifts were card related. There was a new card binder, which I've already used to replace the forlorn excuse for one that barely protected my far-from-complete 1982 Topps set. I used to dread looking for cards in that binder because I could barely turn pages, and when I did, it was a 20-minute project to get the thing closed again. There were lots of pages, too. Very useful. There were two rack packs of 2011 Topps Series 2 from my daughter. The first rack pack yielded the Campy 60...

I'm told that the Yankees are calling up some guy named Jesus when the rosters expand today. He's supposed to be pretty good. But the only thing I care about is that his position is catcher. That means he might nudge Russell Martin out of a few catching assignments, which would be good -- not only because I wouldn't have to listen to Yankees announcers give birth on the air over a .240 hitter, but because Martin on the bench is the only way I have of winning a bet. At the start of the season I placed a bet with The Lost Collector over which teams' catchers would be more productive offensively this season -- the Yankees' Russell Martin or the Dodgers' collection of stiffs. If the Dodgers' catchers were better, I'd win a blaster of my choosing, and vice versa. Now, I bet very rarely. I'm not good at it. But I figured this was my do-good deed for that particular month. I knew that Martin probably would do a little bit better with the Yankees jus...