Night Owl Cards

 (The final battle to reach the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame is going on right now! Have you voted? If not, please vote in the poll by copy-and-pasting this link: https://vote.easypolls.net/62e4287f8d4471006256dcda . I probably will be badgering you about this all week).    I went to Buffalo for a couple of days to visit family last week. It's really my favorite place in all of the world and the wife and I actually had the first of what will probably be a few conversations about retiring there someday.   There is so much that I want to do there when I go, but I don't get to do even one-quarter of it, because I never have much time and family takes up most of it.   But I did manage to stop by Dave & Adam's this time around.   Dave & Adam's is a major online card collecting presence and has been for years and years. It was born right in Buffalo with a small card shop in the early 1990s. I had moved out of Buffalo by that point and didn't actually walk i

I've been out of town, so I gave you an extra day to vote in the second semifinal for the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame vote (not that anyone took advantage of it). The winner of the second semifinal began to take shape a couple of days after the poll went up. Again, I would never have expected the Pilots team card to do so well, but then I didn't think the Rusty Staub Hostess card would do so poorly. Here are the vote totals for the second semifinal after 43 votes: 1. 1970 Topps Seattle Pilots team card - 18 votes 2. 1976 Topps J.R. Richard - 11 votes 3. 1989 Bill Pucko Cards U.L. Washington - 9 votes 4. 1975 Hostess Rusty Staub - 5 votes   So the lone team card of the Seattle Pilots has advanced all the way to the final.     It will take on the power trio of Jackie Gleason and David Cone for entrance into the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame.   Two guys against an entire team, plus a trainer and a guy in a suit? Is that a fair fight?   I don't know, something tel

    I just ran through a list of famous women who are considered the most beautiful in the world to confirm something for myself: Yup, I was right, I don't care about famous beautiful women anymore. OK, wait, let me explain that. I don't care enough about famous beautiful women to get to know who they are, obsess over them, watch all their movies or TV shows, put up posters of them in my room, you know, all that stuff I did when I was younger -- when famous beautiful women were almost all that was on my mind. Well, that and baseball cards. Half of the women on the "most beautiful" list I barely knew and a few I was seeing for the first time. Fifteen-year-old me would be so disappointed with myself. But that stuff isn't as important as it once seemed. That's what happens when you're settled in a marriage and all the life that follows. One day you wake up and you're 50 and your libido has ... well where did I put that thing? Still, like everything when y

  I have been swimming in vintage cards for the last week-plus. I'm helping appraise a collection for an acquaintance and I had no idea he had cards like that. I'll go into specifics some other day on the blog but between this experience and a recent card package I received, I'm even more indifferent to this week's National than I usually am. I don't need it. I've said all these reasons before, but spending a ton of money to spend a ton of money, all while dealing with traffic, crowds and annoying people, is not my idea of fun. I get that people of a certain make-up need to make connections and form card friendships. I'm not into stuff like that much. I'm in the hobby for the cards, folks. And right now, the cards are Right. Here.   Reader Kyle, who has sent me cards prior, gifted me with a selection of vintage needs directly off my want list. It's been so long since I've received a package like this and I've missed the new vintage gifts so,

  I put the two Target gift cards I received for my birthday to good use. It's always fun to try out some new card content once in awhile. I'll never go cold turkey on that stuff. I ordered these online, which was a pain (Target tried to withdraw from my bank account despite clearly accepting my gift cards), and I blame that mostly on the card hoarders. People try to say that "things are back to normal" in the card world with cards "back on the shelf." But those are still nonexistent at the Walmarts near me and extremely hit-and-miss at the Targets. Hoarders and Topps' inability to distribute cards at multiple locations, which it did for the entirety of my collecting from 1975-94, are to blame for this continued bullshit.   But the card boxes happily arrived on a Sunday, of all days, and it was fun to open them. Both are items I would never buy with my hard-earned cash, but they're fun to look through with someone else's!   I'm going to show