Night Owl Cards

Even though the PWE has become much more prevalent in card exchanges through the mail -- who can afford postage prices anymore -- I still see a bit of attitude about it from time to time. Mostly this is in reference to ebay sellers and their lame packaging. Those complainers have a point sometimes. But other times I look at it and think, "it's a plain, white envelope. That's perfectly legitimate for one card." PWE's can pack a surprising punch. Also, there's something meaningful about a PWE that other packaging doesn't possess: "Here's something that I found just for you -- one card -- and I just had to send it." I received three such PWE's recently. One of them contained the card above. It came from R.C. , who got in on Topps' online 3-D promotion before the cards sold out. The 3-D effect is almost impossible to show on a scan, and I don't do gifs, but, trust me, it's quite effective. It has an updated Sportflics...

I have a love-hate relationship with the use of yellow on baseball cards. I realize that it is necessary. There's nothing brighter than yellow, so when you want to alert a card collector -- HEY! BUY THIS CARD! -- yellow helps. Oh, Yeah, it sure does help. But there are other times, some very obvious glaring times -- you know how much glare yellow creates -- when it's too much. There were other colors that could have been selected, other choices that would be a little less offensive, or at least something that could be turned down a notch. (FYI: I wrote about yellow on cards a couple years ago , mentioning some of these same ideas and even doing a countdown. You run out of ideas after 10 plus years). I find yellow not all that attractive given the choices. So when the 1959 Topps set selected yellow for many of the Dodgers cards ... ... yeah, it bothered me. There are so many fun colors in the 1959 set. Seafoam green and pink-house pink and sky blue and orangey oran...

On the day after Christmas, I backed out of the driveway, turned to my right, and spotted a Christmas tree in a snowbank in front of a neighbor's house. This always depresses me. I hope that people who dispose of their tree the second it's not Christmas day have an allergy problem or the tree was a firetrap or something rational other than "I'm done with Christmas, bring on the dullest part of the year!!!" I'm one of those loonies who wants Christmas to last forever, or at least the 12 days that are sung about in the song. I want my ladies dancing and drummers drumming. Right now, for me, is the Christmas season. There are still Christmas cookies in the house, lights shining outside and those cloying Lifetime Christmas movies airing around the clock. Properly extending the Christmas season also gives me the perfect excuse to show some festive packages that were sent with the spirit of the season in mind that I mostly received before Christmas. For e...

I seem to be in the middle of a Fleer revival around here. I am actively trying to complete 1984 Fleer and I'm probably a couple of weeks away from putting up a want list for 1981 Fleer. And then a few weeks ago I announced that if you don't have what I'm looking for in terms of Dodgers or sets, there's always 1981-88 Fleer. So, even though the last thing I need to do is buy new binders to shove into a room that is screaming, " PLEASE , no more binders!" this is where I am. Because I'm definitely going to need a binder for this. This picture is the tell-tale mating call of 1988 Fleer. I'd recognize those red and blue stripes anywhere. And I am hooked. This is the amount of 1988 Fleer that I was looking at before the big box of the Barbershop Pole Set showed up from Matt of The Summer of '74 blog . That's all I had accumulated over the years. I collected very few cards in 1988, just a pack of Topps that year and that was it....