Night Owl Cards

As one of the few card bloggers currently blogging who was also blogging in 2008, I can divide those who were writing nine-plus years ago into a few different categories: 1. Still blogging, who knows why 2. Quit blogging, but still collecting 3. Quit blogging, ditched cards, and took up butterfly watching or skeet shooting or whatever 4. Basically quit blogging but throws a post on the old site maybe once a year I don't want to speak for everyone who was blogging in 2008, but I think anyone who was writing about cards then, whether they're still blogging or not, is somewhat disenchanted with the current state of cards. Anyone who isn't, hasn't been blogging for almost 10 years. I think that's only natural. As you grow more experienced, your tastes become more well-defined. You know what you like and don't like. Newer items aren't appealing because they don't match your established tastes. And so it is when I buy current cards. I still mak...

I've failed you and did not take a picture of my reorganization of my giant Dodgers box of dupes -- and accompanying satellite boxes of dupes. It took three days to finish and was conducted entirely while sitting on a hardwood floor. Needless to say, breaks were mandatory. I normally conduct this exercise once a year, in September. But life got busy and the dupes piled up and I finally found a little time last week. Normally I use the dining room table, but there were too many people about for that. So I commandeered the spare bedroom and started piling stacks of cards by decade that needed to join the rest of the dupes. Some may wonder why I go through such a tedious routine for cards that are duplicates. Why do I organize stacks, then ad those stacks to the box, then pull out more cards from the box, and join more cards from the stacks to the more cards from the box, and repeat the process over and over to a mind-numbing degree, more mind-numbing than reading this paragraph...

I am a big believer in the saying, "if you want something done right, do it yourself." To some, that is the mark of a control freak, someone who can't delegate, not a team player. I am probably guilty of some of that although I don't think I make it too obvious. I don't like that I'm such a big believer in that saying. It's just that it keeps proving itself true over and over. The last couple of days I've been consumed by a work project. It's a lot of effort, requires quite a bit of input from a variety of people, and there are many elements to it, with lots of scheduling involved. The people under my direction have it down like clockwork. They write quality stories, meet deadlines, provide the right photos. It's the people who are not under my control who repeatedly dropped the ball the last two days. I can't help but notice that. That probably means I'm not noticing when people out of my control do their jobs, but serious...

Before you get nervous, I consider the internet a lot more good than bad (I'm fully behind net neutrality, by the way). There is so much good that has come from the internet from my perspective, both in my personal and professional life. Yet, there is so much disgusting, awful, shrill, what kind of cretins am I sharing the earth with, badness about it, too. I encountered all of this in a matter of days recently, as it pertains to baseball cards. The other day, I was wandering the blogs when I came across a card that never was of Gerald Hannahs from the creator of When Topps Had (Base) Balls. I naturally paused on the card because, one, it showed Hannahs as a Dodger, and two, almost nobody knows who Gerald Hannahs is or that he was a Dodgers prospect. The people who do know his baseball days are people from my generation who grew up with the Dodgers. Sometimes they make card creations of Hannahs himself that later show up on CBS (more on that later). That's becaus...

Since the Dodgers lost the World Series, I've received a handful of "pity packages" from thoughtful individuals. OK, I guess "care packages" sounds better. That's why they're called "care packages." Nobody wants your pity. But cards? Yeah, I'll take the cards. Recently I received one of my favorite kinds of card packages. Not only was it sent to help me get over "the Dodger blues," but also as thanks for writing the blog. This always warms my feathers, because even though I must write regardless of whether anyone's reading, it's still nice to know it's not just me yammering into the electric void. Jeff from Ohio sent a whole mess of Dodgers, many of which I had already because you have to stay up pretty late in the evening to sneak a Dodger card past me. But the best part of packages like this is the cards I unearth amid the 2008 Upper Deck and 1989 Score that slide right into my collection and make me so ha...

Greetings, food-preppers and TV vegetators. It's the day before Thanksgiving and I've got a post that hopefully will last you the whole holiday. Perhaps you've seen that map of the United States separated into regions according to the side dish that is most prominent on the Thanksgiving table. The Northeast was declared squash country. I've lived my whole life in the Northeast and have never had squash at Thanksgiving. In fact, the whole map was filled with stuff I never eat at Thanksgiving -- macaroni and cheese, cornbread, salad. Here is a proper Thanksgiving table according to me: Turkey STUFFING (in capital letters as it deserves to be) Mashed potatoes Sweet potatoes (I like the melted marshmallows on top) Cranberry sauce Green bean casserole (this comes from my wife's side of the family, it's OK) Rolls of some sort Pies (any kind will do, but pumpkin must be an option) Most of these food traditions are rooted in the '70s when I was a k...