Night Owl Cards

   (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...

I put a 40-inch NFL roundup in the newspaper last night. For you people who don't speak "column inches," that's around 1,320 words. That's a tremendous amount of words for a sport whose season ended 23 days ago. But I've learned over the last few years that football, particularly the NFL, never ends. It shows up on the wire, on TV reports, everywhere, around the calendar. I'm trying to think of a month in which the NFL doesn't broadcast itself: June, maybe. There doesn't seem to be much NFL news in June. That's about it. (You could probably say the same for baseball, although the baseball news is pretty slow in parts of December and January. But I'm never ready for baseball to end, so seeing offseason baseball news is never a bother). I'm probably contributing to the ubiquitous NFL info glut by publishing a post that features mostly NFL cards. I recently received a few cards each from readers Chris and Henry. And NFL cards wer...

My daughter received an email this morning from her former place of employment exclaiming, "BLACK FRIDAY STARTS TODAY!" How typical of a profit-seeking business. Can't be satisfied with suckering people into their stores the day after Thanksgiving, they have to take Thanksgiving and the whole week, too. I won't be participating in Black Friday, either in person or online, as is my custom. But please don't go away disappointed! I do have some black-themed goods for you today. Matt from Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits sent me a bunch of cardboard darkness! First, he showed me a soccer card to throw me off the trail: He mumbled something in a note about all the cards being soccer cards. "Oh, great," I said to myself, completely falling for it. "I've got to get the chimney inspected so I can burn all these cards in the fireplace on camera." But I won't fall for a tirade on everything I don't understand ab...

This is the card-buying season for me. I have time, I have money, I had a birthday. The rest of the year I'll be scrambling constantly, scraping to get by, with people telling me how lousy I am. So I need to appreciate this moment while it's here. Each year, I choose to appreciate it by purchasing cards. I placed a COMC.com order earlier today and you'll see the contents in a couple weeks. To bide my time, I went to the usual retail outlets for cards. The ritual began a couple weeks ago with a blaster of brand-new 2016 Stadium Club. I went to Walmart, grabbed the first box of SC I saw and got lucky. I pulled an autograph. That didn't last long in my possession. It's been traded for a load of goodies that you could see as early as tomorrow. But it made me realize how cool it was to pull an autograph, just from the reaction you get (and the trades that might turn up). About five days later, I was in Walgreen's, looking for junk food for the All-Star ...