Night Owl Cards

Sadly, we've reached the end of mini week. It's been quite a ride and not at all a well-disguised series of trade posts. Why would you even insinuate something like that? Anyway, for my final mini post, I have some mini offerings from Rod at Padrographs , and they're not even cards. If you remember back to this post , I mentioned that I received some miniature Dodger "figurines" from Rod, along with the very cool book that I am proud to own. I don't know if "figurines" is a technical term. I try to avoid any conversation that includes the word "figurines." And now that I've used "figurines" four times, I'm thinking of closing down my own blog out of shame and confusion. So without further embarrassment, here are the three mini-figuri ... er, figures that I received: Each of these little guys is 3 1/2 inches tall and made out of your typical Made-in-China toy plastic material. I have no idea what they are,...

I go to a card show about three times a year that is billed as the biggest card show in the state. I don't know if that's true, but the show has plenty of cards for my taste. I can find almost everything that I'm looking for -- vintage, current cards, oddballs, junk wax, mojogenic hits, you name it. Of course, I'm far from the pickiest collector, so that show will always have something I want. But there is one thing that I have never seen at this show: 1975 Topps minis. I'm sure there are plenty of other types of cards that never show up at this show, too. But I'm not looking for those cards. I am looking for '75 minis. And I always come up empty. I suppose if I actually inquired about whether anyone has any, I might ended up looking at some. But I always get distracted by something from '71 or '56 or something shiny. So imagine my surprise when I received three separate packages in the mail in the last two or three weeks, each of which conta...

First, a message for Shelly. Shelly, darling, thanks for the invitation. I'm glad that you like my blog. But I bet you tell that to all the blogs. In fact, I've been looking around, and you DO tell that to all the blogs. I'm not interested in your free collectors zone, whatever that is. I'm not good in groups and I don't like people advertising on my blog. So I will keep deleting your come-ons all day (and all night) long. And, finally, learn how to spell "website." OK, up above is a '75 Lineage mini from Cardboard Catastrophes . It's a card for the crazy cause of collecting all the '75 Lineage minis. I have a handful more on the way, but even with those I probably need like 85 more. That's OK. This is a long-term project. Because I'm not collecting 2012 Heritage and 2012 Gypsy Queen and whatever else, I'll be slowly adding '75 Lineage minis. It's been a lot of fun so far. I love seeing that mini stack grow and ...

I've heard the complaints from Wordpress users who say they aren't able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore, or are only able to through a great deal of effort. That's tough to hear. I like comments. But even a Blogger user like me has noticed the comment set-up isn't the way it used to be -- Blogger is tinkering with something for some unknown reason. But I have a different complaint about Blogger and it has to do with following blogs. I follow many, many card blogs. Blogger lets you officially only follow 300 (why, I don't know), but if I could follow more I would. I have been at the maximum for probably a couple of years now. Not being able to follow as many blogs as you want is a minor inconvenience, but for a long time it wasn't too difficult to handle. If a new blog came along, I would merely search out a blog that hadn't posted in like a year, delete that blog from my following list, and add the new blog. That way I'd still be at the 300 n...

More than ever, I am cautious about entering group breaks. Sometimes it's for money reasons, but just as often it's because the sets being broken will yield a bunch of dupes for my collection. As a team collector I've accumulated quite a few Dodgers cards. I tried to figure out how many about a year go and came up with a guess-timate . I'd say I've added a few hundred more since then. And I've probably added about the same number of doubles. So I'm wary when another group break is announced. Nachos Grande , which holds a lot of group breaks, held one a month or two ago and the sets featured were ones where I didn't need many Dodger cards. I was going to skip it. But then Chris said that he'd be opening a box of 2001 Upper Deck '70s Decade. Goodness gracious, I love that set . Even though I had all the base Dodgers from the set, I was hoping for a hit or an insert of the Dodger variety. Even one of those would be worth the price. So...