Nothing cheese can't cure

So it's the day after Christmas and it's time for card collectors to show what kind of cards they were gifted.

As you know, I am not related to Dimebox Nick's dad or Breakdown Gavin's in-laws. There's no card sugar daddy anywhere. Some of the loved ones try but the best they're going to do is venture into the neighborhood card aisle.

That's what my wife did and since there has been virtually nothing baseball-wise in card aisles since June, I wound up with three fat packs of Topps Update. That's 108 cards of mindless pack-opening fun, which is basically all I expected because we all know there was nothing of substance issued in 2017 anyway.

After opening the packs, I was staring at a stack of meaningless cards. Almost nothing worth noting.

I did double my Aaron Judge card count, which means very little now that I can no longer sell these for the price of a house.

This card was odd, just because of the title. Meat? Really?

I pulled this numbered card that I gather is some parallel of this postseason insert set. I guess we're supposed to care because the colored corners are blue instead of the usual black. But mostly I get annoyed when inserts are paralleled. Also, I get annoyed when I pull numbered A's cards. Totally unrelated, the one gold parallel I pulled was a Marlin.

Still, because Update is just about the only thing on shelves, I've ended up with a fair amount of the stuff, enough for me to wonder whether I'm close to completing the set.

After the pack-opening, I organized what I had and determined I am not anywhere close because collation in all Topps sets is crap. Either that or Topps really thinks I need several Dylan Covey cards.

I have no idea who Dylan Covey is.

And Topps' response to that is to give me another Jason Grilli card.

After counting up, I determined I have 215 of the 300 cards in the set. You won't see a want list, because I have no interest in completing this set. One of the major reasons is that out of the 215 cards, a whopping 78 feature a rookie card logo. That is obnoxious. That's more than 36 percent of the set! And a whole bunch of players I don't know! Have I mentioned that Chris Taylor is not in this set?

But the little exercise proved useful as I did find a super short-print.

Yeah. Another Oakland Athletic. Don't tell me Topps doesn't do this on purpose.

I discovered this SSP because the card number didn't have a "US" in front of it (am I the only one bothered by the "US" in front of the card number? It muddles the number when you're sorting. I would much prefer the letters after the number and, really, just a single letter, such as "114U," like in the old days of "114T". Much easier to read).

Instead the card number read "53" with a "Series 1" underneath it. Weird. A Series 1 card in Update.

But, sure enough, the regular, base 53 was already in my collection.

Not that any of this matters, since it's an Oakland A, and it will stagnate in my collection for years. Just as the postseason Oakland A parallel will. Just as the goldie Miami Marlin will.

Overall -- even though it wasn't as horrifying as last year's Christmas card gift -- this card gift was pretty useless (although thoughtful). I'm not going to throw up my hands, because the second half of Christmas gift opening is coming later in the week, and prospects are a bit better.

Also, my daughter happens to work across the way from the Hickory Farms kiosk and picked up this:

This, my friends, absolutely obliterates 2017 Update in terms of happiness.

Cheese cures everything.