Night Owl Cards

  I'm already pleased with the brand-new collecting atmosphere on Bluesky as compared with Twitter. One excellent sign is I can find blog topics from the upstart site, which was a big Twitter benefit before it went south. The other day, the discussion turned to Roberto Clemente cards, and I realized that just about every vintage Clemente card that I have acquired comes with a story. I suppose that's a given with how treasured and expensive his cards can be, but it's just weird how the stories jump out with him. I don't know if I can say that about any other vintage player.   To demonstrate, I will go through each of my vintage Clemente acquisitions and the story that is attached to each. I don't have a lot of vintage Clementes, so this won't be long. Also, longtime readers have likely read these all before because I've recounted each of them on my blog when they happened. But this blog is about 70 percent regurgitation at this point anyway.   July 2024 1969

  Now that the 1975 Topps worst-to-best countdown is finished, I'm a bit lost without having anything to count down. I'm sure I'll come up with something else eventually but right now I have at least one counting up series in the works. It's somewhat of a poor substitute, but it is helping my collection -- in theory. I started The Awesome Night Card Binder review in April , showing off the first 12 pages of my night card binder. The hope was that it would get me to find and add more cards to a stagnating project. I have to say I haven't done much in the last 6-7 months. I did add a couple more 2024 Topps cards, but I kept running into road blocks for other '24 cards -- too much goodness in the binder. I'll have to dig deeper into Series 2 and see if I can fill some holes in the higher numbers, because that's where all the holes are. All right, I've got pages 13-24 for you now. Again, I don't know how interesting this is for readers, but we know t

  I admittedly have a tough time updating my want lists these days. Early on, my want list was just for myself. Written in a notebook or later on a spreadsheet, I was the only one who saw them. It didn't matter if they were updated, though I certainly got a thrill over crossing out a previous need in ballpoint pen. But if I skipped the process occasionally, it didn't matter. Then I started a blog and people noticed and they started sending me cards and I added a want list to my own blog that was Very Important. People from far away consulted it and tried to keep it as up to date as possible. If I didn't, folks would send me dupes -- not their fault -- but I already had plenty of those. Then TCDB came along, which was a much more efficient way to create and maintain want lists. I created one over there and now it is more accurate than the want lists on my blog. But I've kept the want lists on my blog because I think people still check them sometimes and also it's a l

  I deactivated my Twitter account today. Just like that, 12 years, more than 4,000 followers, and who knows how many tweets, gone. Of course it's technically not called "Twitter" anymore and that's pretty much the reason I've left. It actually took almost a year-and-a-half to cut the cord. But when the new owner took over in July of last year and the changes to the site immediately took a turn for the worse, I knew I'd eventually leave. I've been on the relatively new social media app Bluesky for the last 10 months. In the past week, it's seen an influx of collectors from the old site and, for now, Bluesky really seems like Twitter back in 2013, although without much of the crankiness that seemed to come with Twitter even in the good old days.   I know a lot of my regular readers aren't on other social media sites like Twitter or Instagram, etc. So maybe not many here can relate. I admire you folks, really. It sounds nice.   But my involvement in

  As a lifelong introvert, I remember being very concerned as a teenager when I found out that "it's not what you know, it's who you know" was a significant part of landing a career. At least that's what I was told. I was horrified. I still have a problem speaking to people when there's an ulterior motive behind my words. "Working your connections" makes me shudder. What connections? Oh, I was in trouble.   In the years that have followed, I'm happy to say that most of the connections I've made in my career have been based on my talent, not empty words. It's been true in this hobby, too, thanks to this blog. But I do know how to work the connections out in the real world -- if I really try -- and that's because of the hobby, as well. It happened just this past weekend. I went to the monthly card show Saturday. I had an actual plan this time. It was "find the guy with the 1969 commons." This was because when I went to the mal