Night Owl Cards

  I received an unexpected quick flyer in the mail last week from reader Grant. Of the variety of items in the envelope, very few were cards.   Just two, in fact. One was this 2025 Topps Cosmic Chrome Josh Allen card. I consider it good luck because the package arrived on Thursday, mere hours before Allen and the Bills beat up on the Lions defense. (I know, not difficult to do).   This was the other card, a Heritage buyback, a.k.a., someone/something stamped Rick Auerbach's 1976 Topps card.   This is just my second '76 Heritage buyback, as only 1975 cards get the collecting treatment in this house. But I certainly will take any stamped Dodgers, no matter the year.   And that was it for the cards.   But there was more and I consider it the highlight of the envelope.     Those are wax pack wrappers -- from my prime collecting time -- and a couple are from sets that I never collected as a kid -- because I never saw them for sale.   For informati...

  I didn't grow up in a coffee family. My dad would have a cup once in a great while, usually when company was over.   I associated coffee-drinking with the older generation. My grandmother, especially, drank coffee with just about every meal and two of her many quirks included dunking pizza in her coffee and stating "they're trained not to look at you" when she couldn't get a waitress' attention for a second cup of coffee.   That's who drank coffee as far as I knew -- my grandmother, the women she played cards with, and others from her generation.   I never drank coffee and only recently have picked up a cold coffee habit (I dislike hot drinks). And for decades, all those things that went hand-in-hand with the drink -- mugs, stirrers, sugar cubes, little milk pitchers and, often, cigarettes, were foreign to me.   At the top of the list was something called "half and half". For years I didn't know what that was. Even when I worked as a bus bo...

   Blogger may be trying to kill off our card blogs but it can't kill off the Blog Bat-Around. This is the second one I've done this year!   I have a little window of time today that I didn't expect to find, so this is a nice, quick topic to address as year 19 gets under way.   Torren' Up Cards touched off the Blog Bat-Around by listing the three hobby accomplishments that make him the most proud . He should be proud, too. I can't even conceive of doing most of the card things he mentioned.   I have some obvious ones myself, though. I'm going to mention just the three, though I could do much more if I thought about it a little. Here they are:   1. Ran a card blog for 18 years and counting   What's the record for consecutive years operating a blog? I certainly don't know. In terms of sports card blogs I know I don't have the record, there are a handful that started before I did and are still going in some form or another.   But the part that make...

Eighteen years ago this very day I started Night Owl Cards. This blog is officially an adult.   This anniversary comes at an uncertain time for this blogger in particular, and maybe a few others. Google seems to be giving up on its Blogger responsibilities. Last weekend, nobody could comment on any blog and this past week, the function for updating blogs -- both on the reader list and in the sidebar blog rolls -- has stopped working.     In order to keep up to date with the newest blog posts, I've had to go to each card blog individually, and, even with only 50-60 blogs to check these days, who has time for that? Not many, judging by the lack of comments I've seen on other people's blogs. (But did you know there's a new blog bat-around happening ??)   For those who want readers to come to their blogs, I'll mention the Feedburner site again. It's worked for me around 90 percent of the time.   The web address is feedburner.google.com. I go there when I have a...

   (Note: I'm still waiting for Dana to get back to me with an address so I can mail the winnings from the 6,000th post contest. I'll give it another week for an answer. If I don't hear by then, the No. 2 person on the contest list gets the prize (I'll need his address, too)).   ----------------------------------------------------------------    One of my all-time favorite "impossibles" when it comes to card sets is the 1967 Topps Giant Stand-Ups , a 24-card proof set that wasn't released.   I love the look -- the floating heads on the dark background -- but I'll never land any, which is why I still have the 2009 REA Auctions book that includes pictures of the set.   The next-best thing, I guess, is the 2016 Heritage insert set, a tribute to that test set. They're not the same thing -- it's 15 cards instead of 24 (neither fits nicely in a 9-pocket page), and the cards are smaller as they're standard 2 1/2-by-3 1/2. Finally, unlike the origi...