Night Owl Cards

I've been watching "classic" episodes of Sesame Street on Netflix lately. Is that weird? Should a 48-year-old guy be doing that? Is this a mid-life crisis? Anyway, it doesn't seem weird to me. I've been enjoying seeing skits and puppets that I haven't seen since I was 8. And, while I was watching it, I came up with the perfect example of my approach to collecting at the start of the year. As I mentioned before, I don't really set goals with collecting. I have a general idea of what I like and then I go after it. I don't want to tie myself down in a hobby that's supposed to be fun. Cash flow will take care of that soon enough. I'm gonna have fun while I have money and get what I want. In short, my collecting goal in the coming year is this: Does that sound a little like the Cookie Monster? It does to me. He knows what he wants, cookies. He accumulates cookies any way he can. It doesn't matter the time or place. Collecting coo...

This is the time of the year that folks trot out their year-end reviews and top-10 lists. It's been going on for ages and I've always looked forward to the retrospectives. As a youngster, I couldn't wait to see Sports Illustrated or Time magazine as they reviewed the year that was. And on the radio, Casey Kasem or some other knock-off radio show would count down the top songs of the year. The top 30 or 40 list would balloon to a top 100 list and it was glorious. If you got lucky, it would be the end of the decade and not only would they count down the top songs of the year but the top songs of the decade. During the early '80s, lists became a huge fad and books of lists suddenly appeared on bookstore shelves (you remember bookstores, right?). I received a couple of those books and ate them up. Then Late Night With David Letterman started his nightly Top 10 Lists and sports programs like CNN Sports Tonight and ESPN started regularly issuing lists and countdowns and,...