Night Owl Cards

A month or two ago, I documented how well the Nebulous 9 worked by recounting how four different people had sent me this Maury Wills In Action card in a very short span of time. Obviously, I needed just one Maury Wills In Action card, so three of the senders didn't meet their objective. None took that more to heart than one of the senders, Keith, a.k.a., EggRocket. I received a package from him recently with the accompanying note: Ah, so you really wanted to send me some cards that I needed, huh? All right, I'm game, let's see what you've got. I opened the wrapped stack and nearly 30 cards off my 1972 Topps want list came out. This is so much better than a single Maury Wills card. Let's look at these card-by-card from lowest number to highest: #297 - Claude Osteen I recently revamped my '72 want list because I discovered I needed several more cards than I had listed there. I'm not sure what happened the first time I wrote the ...

When I was a kid, I drew a line on the breakfast table between the cereals that were edible and the cereals that clearly were not. On the side of "fun to eat" was Cap'n Crunch, the Monster Trio (Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Boo Berry), Corn Pops, Sugar Smacks (dig 'em), Magically Delicious Lucky Charms, Coo-Coo For Cocoa Puffs, and Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles. On the side of "that's not food" were dreaded concoctions like Product 19, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes and Wheaties. Wheaties was the worst. I refused to eat it. My brother, though, was a cereal nut. He'd eat just about every brand. He'd willingly get up at 7 a.m. (this is when he was a teenager, mind you) and also willingly pour a big bowl of Product 19. It was sad. He'd also eat Wheaties. And claim to like it. I figured it had to be because of the athletes. Bruce Jenner was on the Wheaties box at that time and it was a huge deal. General Mills had worked long and hard ...

Recently, I've received some collectible tins from a couple fellow bloggers. These come directly from the period when I wasn't collecting, and so, like anything from that period, I look at it quizzically as if I'm a dog and someone has just placed a piece of lettuce in front of me ("What is this? I can't eat this and I can't play with it!"). The first tin was a Sweet Spot version that came from Max at Starting Nine . I apologize for the horrible stolen images, but the World Series game is almost on, I've got a story to write for work and there is no time to fool around with a camera. Trust me, this is what the tin I received looks like. Without the muddled blurriness. This is from 2007 and I was collecting a little in '07, but mostly just base Topps and I had no clue that there was a thing called Sweet Spot. Now let's go to an era in which I had no knowledge of 99 percent of the cards that were produced then: More ganked...