Yesterday I attended the big show at the state fairgrounds that goes off twice a year. The last time I was there was in September and I obtained the majority of cards from three dealers who are almost always there and almost always get the majority of my business. I was so confident that they would be there this time that I didn't bother to update my blog want lists or to finally figure out how to access my TCDB want lists on my phone. I just took my hand-penned want list for 1969 Topps and 1979 Topps football and stuffed them in my pocket. If two of those dealers were there, then that would be sufficient. Well, neither of the two were there. This was a crisis because they are there so often I automatically thought something was wrong. Then I realized just about all my vintage options were gone. The crumpled list in my pocket was useless. It was time to regroup, though after I did, I walked the show with a lot more uneasiness than I usually do. Not only were...
It was kind of busy this weekend. I went down for a card show today and it takes quite a bit of driving -- this is the bigger one, instead of the one right in town. I'll have a full report on that in the next day or two, but I wanted to make a quick observation about some very modern cards for a moment. The above three cards sit consecutively in the 2025 Topps portion of my Dodgers binder. They are all parallels. But they are not the same parallel. Perhaps you can tell from the image. I realized after taking pictures that the differences are a little more obvious in the photos than if you're just looking at them with the naked eye. But let's go through the "differences" shall we? River Ryan is the "Holo Foil" parallel. Teoscar Hernandez is the "Confetti" parallel. Shohei Ohtani is the "Sandglitter" parallel. None of these parallels are numbered, which would have helped narrow things down. As you can...