Night Owl Cards

    Yeah, definitely something odd going on with Blogger's reading list. It's started dredging up posts from long-dead blogs that are five, eight, 10 years old. I've actually seen a couple of old Gint-A-Cuffs posts. I got excited for a second and thought Mark had reappeared and was reviving it for this year's A&G set! I admit I've clicked on a couple of those once-active blogs and read an old post or two. Things were a bit easier on the blogs then, you didn't have to fight a bunch of other social media outlets for hobby eyes.   Back then, too, it was easier for me to select a Card of the Year. I'd devote a post to it every year. But I haven't done that for quite awhile.   It took Nachos Grande's annual End-of-the-Year Awards (today's the last day for nominations ), for me to think about this year's Card of the Year. I thought and I thought and I thought ... and then I left the category blank. Nothing was coming to me.   That's not a s...

  I did my usual blog post ritual Tuesday, writing it up in the early afternoon and then setting a publish time for a few hours in the future.   The post did publish and it appeared on everyone's blog rolls, but it didn't show up on the blogger dashboard/reading list. That's happened periodically over the years and eventually it does show up. I waited and waited and it still didn't. It's on the reading list now if you go back a day or so on the dashboard, but I have a feeling some readers missed it.   So let's see what happens with this one. There's a weird synchronicity going on with the 1974 Topps set right now. Maybe that's not the right description but that's what I'm calling it.   For starters, it's the 50th anniversary of the first set I ever saw, the first cards I ever owned. I've written about that lots and have mentioned that it's the anniversary of my first baseball cards several times this year. One of the more recent ones...

  I've been part of a lot of Nachos Grande group breaks over the years. It's an easy way to get cards of my team without suffering through blasters that insist on adding White Sox and Marlins, as well as landing some cards from those years when I was in a dark place (i.e. not collecting). I don't have the funds all the time so sometimes I leave and then come back and I came back recently for another one of his Breakers Club breaks through Discord. I always have fun with the breaks. Chris is great, he finds great sets to open and everything is done on the collectors' terms, they get the cards when they want them, Chris isn't making any money off of the whole thing, he's just trying to pay for the boxes. So it was a surprise when I ordered up my cards a week or so ago and discovered maybe a day later that not all the cards were there. I tore the house apart looking for them, I even went through the garbage -- the messy, icky garbage -- in search of them, I've...

  I put on my winter coat this season for the first time Friday. As always when returning to a coat that has hung in your closet for months, the pockets can yield forgotten mundanes from the past. The best: cash; the worst: gum wrappers or discarded tissues. What would it be this time? Well, it was just a grocery store receipt. I looked at the date: March 23. I remembered buying the items on the list. It didn't seem long ago at all, like that happened last month. The year 2024 has gone by in a flash, the fastest year on record, I'm sure. Today is day 337 of 2024 with just 29 days left. It's a nice time to pause for a moment and see what cards I can unearth that were numbered 337 in their respective sets! I haven't played this game in a year and a half so let's get to it. As a reminder, this is a riff on the old idea that stars got numbers that ended in '0' or '5' and common players received the number scraps. I select five notable cards from my colle...

(Greetings from one of only a handful of places on earth that received more than three feet of snow this weekend. No, I'm still not used to this after 30-plus years. I need some Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 345th in a series): Sometimes I can't believe my luck when I decide to write a post. This card has been sitting on my desk as a possible topic for months and I only decided to post it because I needed something quick during a holiday filled with visitors and snow. As I uploaded the card and searched for an online version of this newspaper front, the date on the top hit me: "December 1, 1993". Hey, today is December 1! Thirty-one years ago today, this Florida Times-Union edition was published, a day after the Jacksonville Jaguars were named an NFL expansion team. Obviously a momentous day in the city. I found a couple of photos containing the cover image on the Jaguars' web site. YES.   I have no attachment to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Like many NFL fans ...