Night Owl Cards

  It's another Labor Day spent at work for me. I tried to think of the last time I had Labor Day off and I eventually gave up. I know I was off in 2002, but since then, no idea. It's safe to say that I have worked way more times on this day than I have not. That's the nature of this job and our school system in this part of the country. School starts immediately after Labor Day, which means school sports start then, too. In fact, Labor Day used to be the unofficial start of school sports. They've since pushed into August, a full week or so before classes begin. Still, no matter when they start, I'm not getting a third day off this week. It'll come later on this month. I am writing this post at work right now. I had hoped it would be an easy night with the new set-up that I had mentioned in my blog post last week. But, of course, it's work, so there's a snafu immediately that makes tonight just another grind. So I'm writing this post quickly.   I ofte...

  Yesterday was Ron Cey's 73rd birthday and, don't you worry, I took care of acknowledging it. It didn't show up on the blog but it did appear on Twitter. That isn't even all of autographs in the collection. You can fit only so much in the frame. But the rate of me accumulating Cey cards, autographed or otherwise, has slowed dramatically. There haven't been many new Cey cards recently (Topps has mostly ditched its retro-appreciation of '70s/'80s players for, ugh, steroid-era '90s players). And all that's around for me to collect are a few autograph cards I don't own or a bunch of parallels. I've mentioned this the last few Cey birthday posts, and I was starting to get sick of hearing myself repeat this lament. But then one day, while pondering cards to obtain, I looked to the ceiling and that's when it struck me: Of course, north! Go north! O-Pee-Chee!!! I don't know why I never thought of that before. I have OPC Ron Cey cards in my c...

When I was a kid, my brother and a couple of friends of ours would pretend we were radio hosts. As kids from the '70s, the best way to do that was to use your parents' cassette recorder (the one with the carrying handle with the big buttons in the front). And to jazz up your recordings, every once in awhile we would record what we heard on the radio and mix it in with what we said. The way we did this was to push the cassette recorder as close to the radio speaker as possible. We thought this was the height of innovation and we were quite proud of our work. We'd listen to those tapes over and over. One time, one of us said something into the recorder and added "let's see what the man on the street has to say." Then we turned on the radio and recorded the first words we heard. Those words were "it's the spice of life." That threw us into hysterics. Absolute hysterics. Imagine two boys and two girls, ranging from age 8 to 12, lying on the ...

I'm sure there are a lot of popular movie quotes traveling through your brain at any given time. In fact, I know that there is. I've run into a number of people, most of them significantly younger than me, who can barely put together a complete thought without underlining it with a movie quote. The quotes that I know usually stay in my head. And one that revolves through my brain's rotation at least as often as any other is the line from "Broadcast News," when the Albert Brooks character, in the midst of feeding lines over the phone to the William Hurt character (through Holly Hunter), who is on broadcasting on the air, says, "I say it here, it comes out there." This quote comes in handy a lot in my profession. But it also comes in handy a lot -- and in a much more pleasant way -- on this blog. There have been countless times in which I have merely mentioned a card on a blog in a slightly complimentary way and it shows up in my mailbox. It happe...