Night Owl Cards

I get a lot of trade requests or offers from people to send me cards. I don't know how it compares with other bloggers -- maybe it's not as much as others, maybe it's a lot more -- but it seems like a lot to me. I try to respond to most, although I do get a little wary if the offer says "hey, I've got cards for you, send me an address." A little more information, please, so I can be reasonably certain that there won't be a human head in the package when I give you my address. But I admit lately I've gotten a bit unresponsive. It's not because of my increasing fear of receiving a human head. It's something more mundane. Before I went on vacation, I was bored by blogging, What I saw on the blogs, what I saw of the cards. Bored, bored, bored. This isn't a comment on anyone's content, it's a comment on me. I just didn't care, for whatever reason. Then, when I went on vacation, I did something I haven't done since ...

You can expect to see this card again in December. Look at all those Jingle Bells colors. It's Christmas in July! Makes me think it's going to snow even though it's 91 right now and hasn't rained for weeks. I present this card to you while not exactly in a "Look! Manny Ramirez never played for the A's!" frame of mind. It's kind of fun, much like the old '70s days in which Bill Grief appeared as an Expo even though he never played for them, or Bud Harrelson as an Astro, or innumerable Blue Jays and Mariners in the 1977 set. But it's kind of frustrating in that it's a bit of fiction in your team binder while middle relievers remain total non-entities to Topps. But Topps has toyed with Manny's cards for so long now -- removing umps entirely, leaving umps' disconnected legs -- that I'm getting bored with it. I can't even get fired up trying to determine when this photo actually took place. My theory is Ramirez is actu...