Night Owl Cards

  Usernames are an interesting window into individuals. Often, nobody ever sees your username, except for whatever entity is verifying that you really are you when you transact online (prove, prove, prove you're not a robot). But in our line of entertainment, usernames are quite visible. It's what appears when we comment on a blog or in other social media spaces. Choosing a username is key, I think. But it's pretty obvious other people don't (yeah, you, buttmunch69). I have no idea what some people's usernames mean. Other people, I look at their usernames with quiet admiration. "Yeah, that's a good one." Then there are people who don't even have a user and comment anonymously. To me that's like handing in a blank test paper. Some commenters I know only by their username because they don't have a card blog of their own. Lots of folks comment on my blog who are readers only. I consider that a blessing. One of the best-named of those readers-o...

I'm generally not fond of "cleaning out the draft folder" posts. First, I don't have a lot of "draft posts" going. I pick a topic and write it. There are no half-written posts anywhere in storage. Second, if the cards weren't good enough the first time I scanned them, what makes me think they'll be good enough now ? But desperate times call for lazy measures. In case you haven't noticed, there's been no baseball since Tuesday. Baseball's postseason schedule is almost as irksome as the fact that the game's brass feels the need to speed up games, but won't touch advertisers or broadcast stations that do far more to lengthen games than anything players do on the field. Oh, was that a tangent? Sorry. So we baseball fans are forced to settle for hockey as a suitable alternative until Friday. Those starved for baseball need something to tide them over, and since I have little time to provide something of substance, I figured ...

Cards ceased to exist as I knew them in 1989. Actually, it probably happened in 1985 when Topps issued the U.S. Olympic team set. But that was a subset, which was grouped together and featured a design that differed from the base cards. In 1989, Topps presented 10 cards of players -- who knows WHO they were -- in their college or (lordy, what is this? ) their high school uniforms. And Topps didn't have the courtesy to group them together as their own subset or create a whole new design for them. No, they dispersed them into the base set as if they were regular major league players. Topps noted a difference only with a "draft pick" logo in the corner. Also by selecting 10 players, Topps didn't even have the forethought to consider the legions of collectors who used nine-pocket pages for their collection. So, even if they wanted to separate the NON-major leaguers from the other cards in the set, they couldn't. It would look like this: No place for Robin ...