One of my worst blogging fears realized

 

 

One of my "unwritten" vows to myself in writing this blog is to try to make each post relatively original.

I know not all of them are. I have specific blog series so each of those have a theme. And anything that is a "look at the new cards I got" can be lumped together as the same idea.

But I try to make those trade posts and "got cards" posts as creative as I can. I've been trying to do that for years. I don't know why I'm so hell-bent on this -- other bloggers repeat stuff all the time -- but the thought of repeating a subject without knowing I'm repeating it, which I'm sure I've done, has been one of my worst blogging fears.

Well, welcome to my nightmare. I made the same post within a year back in March and I'm just realizing it now.

 

It dawned on me that I wrote about the same topic two different times in remarkably the same way when I was writing the latest edition of the 1975 Topps worst to best countdown. As I often do -- again, trying not to repeat myself -- I check to make sure I haven't already mentioned the card in the countdown. I have a list checked on my laptop but sometimes a card eludes checking.

 

I was specifically searching for the '75 Tom Murphy card when I came across a post I titled "Perfect matches". Then my eyes drifted down to a few older posts and my heart sank as I came across another post called "Color match game".

You can check those posts out now and get an idea of how similar those posts are and how scrambled my brain is.

 

They are two separate posts about the same thing -- listing a 1975 Topps card for each team that matches that team's colors the best. ... Wow. But repeating myself isn't the mind-blowing part, I'm quite sure I've repeated ideas through the years maybe even dozens of times. What startles me is that these posts were written not even a year apart -- in March 2023 and May 2022 -- each in response to Twitter prompts ...

 

 ... and I didn't suspect a thing.

The question from phungo arrived in 2023 and if I had my wits about me, I would have responded with "I did that already" and linked to the post, which I have done many many times during Twitter's heyday, but hell, none of us are as good as we once were, Twitter, me, blog ideas. We all suck.

I thought it was fascinating though when I compared the two lists on each of the blog posts. First, for one post I listed the teams alphabetically by city and the other alphabetically by team name. For many of the teams, I came up with the same "best color match" card, but for a good portion there were differences. Here's the breakdown:

 

So I don't think I can any longer consider myself a leading authority on the best color-border-uniform match for each team in '75 Topps cards, but I don't know anyone else who is doing this.

 

The other interesting note between the two posts were the comments on each. On the first one there are six comments, although two are by the same commenter and one is by me. Not a ton of interest, judging by the comments. Then on the second one there are 13 comments (two by me). And not one was "you did this already."

Seems we all have memory issues. 

And, hey, at least I didn't write the same title for each one.