Cards I can't read

I lead a somewhat sheltered life way up here in the north country.

Nobody wants to live here except for us white folk. The military base has provided us with a bit of "color," but basically the population base is as milky white as the sizable snowbanks still dominating every street in the area. If you want to go snowmobiling and talk English, well have I got a place for you.

My collecting is basically the same though. My collection is overwhelmingly baseball. And that means my collection overwhelmingly speaks English. Thanks to O-Pee-Chee and Pacific I've been able to add some French- and Spanish-speaking cards to my collection. But that was about it until Zippy Zappy came along from Torren' Up Cards.

He's added a number of Japanese-speaking cards to my collection, which are always cool. The most recent one arrived in a PWE. It's the Shawn Green card above.

Perhaps you looked at that card askance. It doesn't seem quite right does it. Isn't that the 2003 Topps design? Isn't the border a deep blue on the '03 design?

Yes it is. It looks like this:

It's deep, deep blue and features the customary foil that plagued this English-speaking country for too long.

I'll compare them side-by-side so you don't have to scroll to see the difference.

The color scheme on the card on the right looks very much like Topps' 2001 flagship design.

Maybe they had a little bit extra of that turquoise paint (or whatever hell that color is) to create this Shawn Green card for the Japanese audience!

Ain't that awesome! That is awesome.

I have no idea what that says. I can't read Japanese, but if it's the same info as on the Topps flagship Shawn Green card then that's all I need.

This isn't the only Japanese-speaking card I've received recently.

Not long ago, I received a couple of cards from noted twitterer, Ruff Draft'n. He was following up on a couple of cards that he asked if I need three years ago! Now I don't feel so bad that I'm about three months late on several packages to ship.

But it's all good. It doesn't matter when you get them if you get them. I absolutely don't care about that stuff.

So here are the cards:

They sure do look like cards Zippy Zappy would have sent me from Japan, huh?

He has sent me several of the 2012/13 Sega CardGen cards. These are from Matt Kemp's first tour with the Dodgers. Some pretty awesome photos.

Those are the backs with lots of info I can't read.

If I collected cards from sports with a little more international reknown, like soccer or basketball or even hockey, I could have cards with Russian or Italian or whatever on card backs. That's not really a goal of mine. I think my collection is pretty diverse in a lot of other ways.

Zippy also sent me a couple of Dominik Hasek cards:

Sabres Hasek cards are my favorite hockey cards to get. Both of these cards speak English, but since it's Hasek on the front, they speak it with a Czech accent, which is always fun.

My cards will probably never be viewed collectively in a binder by anyone but me in person, but sometimes I like to imagine someone with only average card knowledge looking through my collection and coming upon a Japanese-speaking card and saying, "Whoa, what are these?"

And I'll proudly declare: That card speaks Japanese. I have no idea what it's saying.