Night Owl Cards

(Today is National Honesty Day. I have always tried to be honest on this blog. Some may get offended, some may quit reading, but at least I'm trying to be true. It's when people are fake that I start to have problems. Time for Cardboard Appreciation, this is the 321st in a series):    I pay almost no attention to Topps' many online/on-demand releases. As a traditional collector, it's difficult for me to get used to cards being available only online -- I've been trained to physically go to a store for so long. Most of the time, it's no loss -- I don't want that dumb-looking card with the regurgitated theme anyway. But every once in awhile, they hook me. I found out about this 75th anniversary Rookie of the Year set from Wrigley Wax , who went nuts with all the Billy Williams parallels. (I have no intention of doing the same). The set is sharp, the black borders reminding me of 2007 Topps. And since the Dodgers have more Rookies of the Year than any other tea

  My first COMC order of the year arrived Monday -- two days after I attended card show, I really need to learn how to space these things out. It would help with the lean months. Part of the order (I'll get to the majority of it next week) was me finding the final cards to complete the Allen & Ginter frankenset that I have been working on for years. The final cards filled the last empty spots as well as replaced some players who were repeated in my frankenset binder. Here are the final dozen: My inspiration for choosing each of these last 12 was the same for finding a card to fill each of the 350 slots -- it just has to be interesting to me. But sometimes there aren't any very interesting cards at a particular number, so then I pick someone who isn't offensive/annoying. My frankenset is a mix of regular backs, A&G backs and black borders/gold borders. I have no desire to create separate frankensets (and binders) for each individual parallel. It was difficult enough

    I forced myself to go to Walmart earlier today because they have the right-size mailing envelopes I need and then they didn't have them and I immediately became annoyed I was there and in a fit of self-loathing for such a stupid decision I walked to the card kiosk thing. The first thing I noticed was 2023 Bowman was out. There were blasters. But I don't buy stuff like that anymore. Outside of Bowman I saw blasters of 2022 Heritage High Numbers and Allen & Ginter and Panini Mosaic. Also fat packs of Optic and Topps team sets for just these teams: Orioles, Nationals, Red Sox, Braves and Cardinals. Come on, find me a Nationals fan here. There was also plenty of 2023 Topps Series 1, but I'm all done buying that. It did remind me though that I need to write a Define The Design post on the set as I try to do every year for flagship. 2023 flagship is fairly easy to name. That graphic treatment at the bottom is totally inspired by today's ballpark video scoreboards. Her

  People from California reading this can probably skip the first few paragraphs. Because, for them, it will be a bit like someone coming up to me saying, "Hey, I just saw the 1974 Topps Traded Oscar Gamble card, it's so cool, you should check it out!" Yeah, I know. So, with that in mind, I experienced the strongest earthquake of my life Sunday. Don't get excited. It was a magnitude 3.6. But we don't get earthquakes, or at least feel earthquakes, very often around here. For the first 20 years of my life, I never felt one. The quake was centered just west of Adams Center, N.Y., which is a town 10 miles away from me. It felt like something exploded in the basement, then there was some brief rumbling. By the time I got outside -- where most of my neighbors now were -- it had stopped. They were rattled. "What was that?" they said. I knew. It was an earthquake. I knew, because I felt one, centered at the same spot, 10 days earlier. It was a 2.6. It came at 2