Night Owl Cards

I intentionally used that post title because I hate the phrase. There are many phrases that activate the skin-crawling mechanism for me, and not all of them are uttered by Chris Berman. Here's another one: "the next level." This is used by hack local sports broadcasters to refer to area high school athletes who sign NCAA Division I scholarships. I recently saw a broadcast about some girls signing to play DI lacrosse, and the on-air idiot didn't say "Division I" a single time. He just uttered "the next level" over and over. Apparently, the girls are signing to play lacrosse on the second floor of their high school. Anyway, this is a housekeeping post in which I regurgitate some random thoughts such as the one above. Follow along, won't you? You may have heard that the Dodgers re-signed Hiroki Kuroda yesterday. You also may not care, but I do. This means the Dodgers have four reliable starters in the rotation and can work on what is really...

About one year ago, I did my first ginormous trade post, combining several trades together. I am sure that at least a few people consider lumping several trades into one monster post as "tacky." To those people, I say "bite me." The massive trade post is my way of accomplishing several things at once. Specifically, I am able to contribute non-trade blog content while still thanking my fellow collectors for sending much needed cards my way. If I didn't do things this way, you would be subjected to a never ending stream of trade posts. There wouldn't be room for anything else. So, as much as I would like to devote a single post to every single trade, I can't. It wouldn't achieve what I wanted to achieve and the blog would cease to be entertaining. Besides one giant, massive trade post is FUN! It's EXCESS. We Americans like excess, don't we? Who doesn't love a deep-fried Snickers bar? Mashed potatoes on a hamburger? Gold foil on e...

You may have heard. The Syracuse Orange were bounced from the NCAA tournament last night. This means only one thing to me. The winter sports season is officially over. And life begins to return to normal. This week I enjoyed my first back-to-back off days in over a month. I spent the first day detoxifying. Didn't leave the house. I spent the second day desperately trying to catch up on what I neglected over the previous four weeks. I'm still woefully behind. On the trading/sending out packages front, I'm slowly returning to speed. I sent out a smattering at the end of last week. I sent out a few more yesterday. I sent out a few more today. And I botched the zip code with one  (Sorry, Project '62. I'll try again tomorrow). See? Out of practice. I'd like to get to the point where I send packages to people out of the blue. But that seems so far into the future. I've received several out-of-the-blue packages from others recently, and I wish I could be...