Night Owl Cards

I don't think I've ever been so relieved to see a month disappear. I always celebrate the end of March with a little party because it's annually the most taxing month of the year. But this month took even more out of me. Had I known what the third month of the year would be like, I would have stayed in college forever. College students seem to be the only people who have fun during March. Maybe I can go back and get a professor to remove a few of my credits. Anyway, since I know March is going to be like this every year, I plan for it. That includes planning the end-of-the-month celebration. This year's end-of-this-god-forsaken-month celebration is highlighted by a special purchase I made a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of beautiful, glorious, what-took-you-so-long March 31st. Yup, I got myself a bunch of minis. Mostly Topps Lineage minis to be exact. I've decided that I better attack this set as quickly as I can before people forget about thes...

During my health funk, I mentioned that I didn't care about trading. It was all a part of being generally ill. You know what it's like being sick. You don't feel like doing anything, even the things you love the most. But I'm afraid I might have scared off a few people. "Night Owl is done with trading!" "Night Owl is retired!" "Have you heard? Night Owl doesn't want your 1991 Donruss anymore!" Well, that is entirely untrue. Except the part about not wanting '91 Donruss. That's always true. No, I may have a problem with pretending that people are breathlessly referring to me by my made-up nickname, but I don't have a problem trading. Sure, it's been crazy as hell around here. Sure, it's still freakin' March. Sure, I've got a new lifestyle that requires I take more time to work out and eat properly and certain old people stuff like that. But I still trade. At my own, methodical, pokey, you'll-g...

Here is a little secret about me that you didn't know: I want to write a book. But I don't know how to go about it. "Yeah, so?" you're saying. "You and about a million other people." Fair enough. But I know that I have the stuff to be an "author." I can write. I write professionally. I have ideas periodically. I've won awards. My stories have appeared in public on the blog, in print and elsewhere for the last 25 years. I have the tools. Here's what's holding me up: 1. I know nothing about the publishing side of things. To me, the publishing world is a strange, foreboding and exclusive place. How do I get published? How do I find a publisher? It's all so nebulous. Getting published in a newspaper? I know how to do that inside and out. But a book? I'm absolutely lost. I know there is self-publishing and all that, but I'm looking for your traditional, mainstream, distribute to the masses, published book. 2....

This was the end of the line for me and Baseball Cards magazine. It would be the last issue I would have delivered to my home and one of the last issues I would ever read (those later issues from the late '80s and then the Beckett spawn are completely foreign to me). I would move off to college two months after the date on the front here. My interest in baseball cards was waning. The period between 1986-88 is a dark one in my collecting journey even as it was one of the best times of my life (what does that say about baseball cards?) In fact, I'm not even sure how closely I looked at this particular issue. So let's look at it closely now, shall we? I apologize in advance for some of the crooked scans. My scanner doesn't like working with anything that has any degree of thickness. Ah, the Q&A section. Once again, this is where collectors wrote in, mostly in hopes of getting rich quick off of the error that they spotted in 1982 Fleer. The question "...