Night Owl Cards

I am making a semi-serious effort to cut down on my Dodger doubles. I've already made arrangements on Twitter to send Dodgers to four or five people. That's not nearly enough to get to a respectable level of dupes. So if anyone wants a variety of Dodgers extras -- and, yes, I know the usual blogging candidates -- please let me know. I'd rather get rid of them this way than in more anonymous ways, which is what I will consider next. One person who already has some Dodgers coming his way is Stewart, who jumped on my offer immediately. Not long ago, he sent a package full of variety straight from Dodger country. There was so much random that I couldn't process it all. In fact, I thought I had absorbed it all finally, when I went back to it last night -- to scan, of course -- and was floored by something grand that I totally missed the first time. I'm saving that piece of wonderful for last as is my custom. In the meantime, take a look at this: All-Time gr...

That is the outdoor temperature where I live as I write this. It's a conversation starter, but it's really no big deal. We north country folk can depend on the temperature plummeting to this number or below just about every winter. You deal with it for a few days, then it gets warmer, and maybe you deal with it again later in the winter. On you go. The most amusing part is seeing how other parts of the country handle that same cold front. In those parts, it's maybe 18 degrees and oh, what a crisis. This also happens during a snowstorm. The more populated portions of the Northeast will get 6-8 inches and they've been "hammered." Meanwhile, the lake effect machine in the north country will stir up maybe 2-to-3 feet in a 24-hour period almost every winter, and we're a mere chuckle on the Weather Channel. No state of emergency, no run on gas and food staples. It's just Friday here. In fact, today I went outside without a coat. I had to let the dog...

Even though the Dodgers won the World Series in 1981, I'm not going to pretend that '81 was a great year, because it wasn't. For those of you who weren't around then, there was the baseball strike, the horrific Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, and a plague of assassination attempts. Music was an atrocious wasteland. For every Tattoo You or video on fledgling MTV, there was Endless Love (and it was endless) , Kenny Rogers croaking "Lady," and I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night (that was the whole damn song). As a teenager glued to my radio, it seemed that just as one horrible song had run its course, another horrid song took its place. Celebrate Good Times, Come On? Not if Bette Davis Eyes kept staring me down from my stereo speakers every half hour. The year was filled with normal teenage angst for me, and baseball cards were there to ease my pain, much as they are today. Those c...

I can't believe someone like Josh Wilker or Ben Henry hasn't addressed this in a post yet. Perhaps they have, and I missed it. Anyway, this is something that has interested me for quite awhile in the way that things of absolutely no consequence interest me. This is the 1974 Topps card of Sparky Lyle. It was the last card I needed to complete the 1974 set. But that's not the topic of this post. The topic of the post is on the back of the card. Please note the cartoon. Click on the image if you can't see tiny type. Note what it says: "Sparky enjoys birthday cakes." Pretty innocuous wouldn't you say? Who doesn't enjoy a good birthday cake? But to me the cartoon is suspicious . What a very strange thing to put on a cartoon on the back of a player's baseball card. I mean, like I said, it's pretty much understood everyone enjoys birthday cake. I'd say 95 percent of everyone in North America likes birthday cake at least, say, oh, once...