Night Owl Cards

I've been around the blog world for awhile now, and I'm pretty well-known, as much as a faceless somebody with a pseudonym can be known anyway. But I don't feel anymore important or "special" than I did when I first started writing this. Sure, I own more cards than I did back then, but I still collect the same. Nobody needs to impress me with over-the top folding book cards, or shadow-box patches, or acetate rainbow parallels only found in a pineapple under the sea. Just a single base card from off my want list will do. I'm happy with that. The other day I received a package from fellow supertrader Brett. I've never dealt with him before, so you know how that goes. You have no frame of reference so you don't know what you're going to get. But, really, unless it's a stack of '91 Donruss in the envelope, there are no worries. Yet, Brett, apparently, wanted to make sure. That's a mess of autographed Dodgers from t...

The bad part about writing an almost daily blog is that sometimes you beat a topic to death so relentlessly that not even the scavenger owl that I am can retrieve anything from its lifeless carcass. I believe I've done that for 2016 Topps, and for 2015 Topps as well. So when two people -- Steve of The Card Chop and Julie of A Cracked Bat -- each send cards that are overwhelmingly packed with the latest from the last two years, there's just no more words. All that's left are semi-pretty pictures (or in the case of 2016 Topps, downright homely pictures). I'll make this quick. Cards from The Card Chop: The McCutcheon Perspectives card is fantastic. I don't understand the complaints about the lettering. If it looks like a cheap mid-1990s graphic, just pretend it's retro. ... The Kershaw, on the other hand -- bleeeaah. I don't need to see my superstars in action that close. And the gold netting is just not getting the parallels done. ... Mea...

It appears that Robert of $30 a Week Habit is controlling programming on Night Owl Cards lately, but I'm bracing for another freaking high school sports Friday, so I'll take all the help I can get. Growing up in upstate New York, just a half day's drive from Yankee Stadium, I knew the Yankees of that period better than the players on my own favorite team. They were in the newspaper, on the TV and part of the conversation in the schoolyard. Plus, the talk was louder than usual because these were the Bronx Zoo Yankees. So there were World Series games, and special ABC Thursday Night Baseball, and magazine articles, and books , for crying out loud. I accumulated as much knowledge about the team than any Yankee fan (more knowledge, in the case of many of them). The prevailing theme about the Yankees during that time as I was growing up is that they were always good. Everyone. Sure, there were a couple of bench scrubs named George Zeber and Mickey Klutts, but they never...

I came across an interesting question yesterday on Robert's $30 a Week Habit blog. He was wondering how to file these buyback cards. For instance, is the card here a 1978 card or a 2015 card, like the stamp says? I had always considered it a 1978 card. It was made in 1978. It gets recorded and filed with 1978 cards. There was never a thought it could be anything else. But I was easily outnumbered in the comments. They filed their buybacks with the year it was stamped, considering it an insert from that particular year. I'm trying not to get riled up about this, but --- aaaarrrrrrrghhhhh, you're playing right into Topps hands!!!! This is not an insert -- and definitely not a hit -- no matter how Topps packages it! It is a regurgitated card ruined by a stamp! It is not a 2015 card, no matter what it says on the stupid stamp or how it was presented! It is a 1978 card, and nothing that a stamp says is going to change that for me! OK, really, you can file your cards ...

I am a member of the MTV generation. There is no mistake about that. MTV was born a month before I entered my junior year in high school. It was the latest, greatest invention, at least according to the most receptive market for these kinds of things: teenagers. MTV videos made up the daily conversation in the cafeteria, where it was mixed with movies, homework, girls, TV shows and idiot teachers in a hormonal stew. For me, and others of that generation, what has happened to MTV is criminal. The station that proclaimed the death of the radio star with its very first video, also killed what made it great, what the people who worked there were so excited about in the first place: music on your television, all day and all night -- and in stereo . The videos that MTV played during those first few years were exactly what we wanted to see. They spoke to us. And the ones that spoke the loudest were the new groups that we were witnessing for the very first time on music television. Ev...