Night Owl Cards

  Hooooooooooooooooo! It's your favorite cardboard-collecting owl's designated holiday! Who decided I'd rather scare kiddies from tree tops instead of page binders inside a well-lit card rooooooooooooom? Who? Who? Was it the same person who decided airing Game 6 of the World Series on a major holiday was a good idea? Who? Who?   When you think about it, Halloween is trooooooooooly the oddball holiday on the calendar when it comes to major U.S. holidays. Almost every other holiday has to do with family, country or religion. Halloween covers a couple of those elements but only tangentially and only if you have little tykes trudging outside in the rain and wind and cold while they beg for gooooooooooooodies.   So on this oddball holiday I have some gooooooooodies of my own -- the cardboard kind -- that arrived on this festive day. They happen to be oddballs, tooooooooooooo! In keeping with the season.     Ooooooooooooo. One of the last remaining 1971 Fleer World Se...

The process of organizing my collection is an ongoing, year-round project for me. But I do more organizing during the last month of the year than at any other time. During November and December, I start cataloging and boxing up sets from the current year. The sets that I don't ever plan to add to go in boxes first and those 2016 sets are already there. Left in stacks are 2016 sets that should grow at least a little during the gift-giving season. Packs of Archives, Heritage, Stadium Club and Allen & Ginter are all on the ol' Christmas want list. But even those sets will likely be boxed up after the holiday; there is almost nothing from 2016 that I want to see in a binder. Meanwhile, I am undergoing an extra bit of organization thanks to the supplies that Dave recently sent my way. He sent both binders and pages and I've already put one of the binders to work. Yesterday, I paged my 1976 SSPC set. It looks absolutely fantastic, and since there is no printing on th...

A recent package from Tony at Wrigley Roster Jenga gave me a project to do, but first a few other cards he sent before the "project" card. This here is a Topps 205 mini of a very young Chad Billingsley, oblivious to the years of surgery ahead. Don't get excited. These are all reprints. Yeah, it'd be nice to have the real thing, but I can now say "I have a card of Hot Potato Hamlin," and how long would it have taken me to say that if I held out for the original? Some Opening Day Dodger needs since I still haven't opened any Opening Day. Here we have two clear superstars, and then one guy who has all of 7 innings in the majors, so of course put him on equal footing with the other guys in a card set with a limited number of players. You can see how the Montas card naturally separated itself from the other 2 on the scanner. It knows it's not worthy. Tony says he's pulled Corey Seager cards in everything he's opened this ...

I didn't expect May to be a month of austerity. My traditional austerity months are March, August and December. Yet, here we are, in a month in which I've barely been able to pay for vending machine chips, let alone a box of whatever Topps is inflating the price on today. This has really cut into my plans to devote this year to acquiring specific needs of mine: Dodgers, set wants and some nice items for fellow bloggers. I had also hoped to go on a spending binge specifically geared toward all of the Dodger cards I still need from 1987-93, excluding annoying parallels like tiffany sets and the like. The plans are still in place. Just delayed. Fortunately, I've gotten the word out sufficiently. This note from Jeff appeared in the mailbox the other day: This is the way to think, everyone. Please follow Jeff's example. He pays attention and that is always to be commended. Jeff is an Angels fan and frequent commenter on a couple of my blogs. He's sent m...

I've made several not-so-serious threats to chuck my card collection and pursue only oddball cards. The threats aren't that serious because there is really only one type of oddball card that would make me happy enough to collect those and nothing else. Those oddballs don't exist in Kaybee sets of the '80s, or Hostess sets of the early '90s, or today's Panini sets, or Post issues from the '60s, or Kahn's hot dogs cards from the '50s. The oddballs that thrill me from collecting head to toe rest in the '70s, with a foot dangling in the early '80s. The bestest oddballs are Kellogg's cards from the '70s and '80s, Hostess cards from the '70s and Burger King/Coca-Cola cards from the '70s and early '80s. This is purely a nostalgic preference as I grew up in the '70s and early '80s. But I contend that those oddball issues are still somewhat more of novelty than at least the later issues because back then ...