Night Owl Cards

  How many times is too many times to go to the Dave and Adam's store when you're in Buffalo? Turns out the answer to that is "three times," at least for me.   I didn't realize it over the weekend, but my latest trip on Sunday was my third visit there this year. I've blogged about each instance , too. ... And my enthusiasm has waned with each visit.   This is more because of the way I collect but also due to the state of the hobby today and, probably, the state of buying and selling in general today. There was stuff there for me -- but it wasn't syncing up.   As I mentioned the last visit, Dave and Adam's store is half apparel (Bills, Sabres and Topps) and half cards and collectibles. I only care about the cards. Because I still collect modern cards, I usually find stuff there and am often impressed with the stock -- blasters and blasters of whatever Topps/Panini has available at the time.   But here's the thing: Topps doesn't have a lot avail...

  When I first started chasing down the 350-or-so cards I needed to finish the 1983 Donruss set, I figured it would take me awhile.   I knew it would take longer than when I decided to finally finish the 1982 Donruss set. With that, I just bought a complete set. It cost me something like 50 bucks. Swift and easy. And with these '80s Donruss sets -- even though they include the players that made me want to complete them in the first place -- they're not appealing enough to get into the whole "joy-of-building" scene that we set-collectors are known to love.   But I knew I couldn't buy the full set of '83 Donruss and be done with it ... well, I could, but I'm not paying that price for a 1983 set. The Boggs-Gwynn-Sandberg rookies were holding up the quest, and I simply decided just to build it the regular way. Maybe I'll be done in 2026, I figured.   But almost two decades into this blog, I'm still underestimating its power and the generosity of collec...

  A little stuck for topics this week (as well as making time to write them) so here's another Match the Song Title post a little earlier in the rotation after the last one . I try to space these out every six months or so.   But this album deserves "Match the Song Title" treatment, I suppose. It's not only one of the biggest LPs of the 1980s, but this year marks its 40th anniversary . It is also one of the last LPs I bought before I went away to college.   This marked the end of an era. I think that this album, "Brothers and Arms" by Dire Straits and "Dream of the Blue Turtles" by Sting were the last LPs I purchased before moving away. Once I arrived at college, LP buys dwindled to almost nothing. Yes, I brought my turntable with me, but I don't know if I brought any albums. Cassettes and, later, CDs were much more portable for a college student with limited space. LPs just didn't make sense.   How things have changed. Not only are LPs nea...

  October is one of the busiest months on the calendar. But unlike some of those other always-busy-months (*cough* "March"), October features fun busy stuff that interests me.   Last night, for example, both of my teams were playing: The Bills (yuck) and the Dodgers (yay!). It was a lot, and I saw almost none of it because I was working. Probably for the best. But then I got home and I wanted to see the Dodgers highlights and that "fly out into a double play" that everyone was discussing online. I waited and waited. It got to be 2 a.m. and still no youtube highlights. I went to bed. Fifteen minutes later the highlights were up.   It's just a lot this month and it's been that way for quite awhile. I do miss the younger days when I didn't have as much on my schedule -- or at least that's the way I remember it. I miss many of the elements of those days, which is why I want cards from back then.   Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading is a great way ...

  For the second straight year, and the fourth time in five years, the Dodgers have reached the League Championship Series.   Many fans -- I have been made very aware -- don't like this. But that comes with the territory when as a fan you're part of an exclusive club for more than one or two years in a row. The Dodgers are the villain.   I know that relatively few on social media will be rooting for the Dodgers. (A lot are rooting for a World Series between the Mariners-Brewers, who are practically the same team). I have tried to add known Dodgers fans to my following list in hopes of balancing out the anti-Dodger content, but the best-case scenario is to avoid social media as much as possible. We'll see how that goes. Social media is great for getting immediate info on plays during the course of a game, nothing else compares.   A lot of the people who comment on this blog aren't part of social media sites, so I'll move on to the card part of the post.   The two...

  I don't know how many more times I'm going to visit my local monthly card show. I can feel my interest waning.   I skipped last month's show, mostly because there was a bigger, better show the next day. But another reason is the content of the local show is just not interesting to me. I've already mentioned how it's now dominated by RPG cards (Pokemon, etc.) and graded slabs of mostly modern football/basketball, but today it was particularly dire.   There was one table that I found dedicated to sports cards as I knew them as recently as 25 years ago. Just, plain, good, ol', unslabbed cards from the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s. It was the usual table I visit. But often there are some other smaller tables with the same stuff, or dollar boxes I can sift through.   But not today. My dealer friend, of course, was not there, having passed last month . The other guy I know who used to work in my office hasn't been there for at least a couple shows....