A slight change of plans

First off, thanks to everyone who showed up and claimed some cards the other day. There was a lot more activity than I was expecting, which was a good thing.

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that I've decided to expedite my series of giveaways. I thought a couple of Tuesdays would be enough to get rid of all of the miscellaneous stuff (mostly baseball) that I'm currently trying to alleviate myself of, but unless I completely overwhelm folks by adding 40 pages or so to each post, I am not gonna be able to move all of this stuff in just 3 or 4 posts. And seeing as how I don't want to drag this on for months, starting next week I'm gonna add Friday to the mix as well. Free Stuff Friday's return!

I think by adding another day I'll be able to get this stuff gone within three weeks. I'm sure that two days a week of giveaway posts will annoy some, especially those that aren't interested in participating, but three weeks isn't very long, so I think you'll be able to deal with it.

So, for anyone interested, next week they'll be new free stuff posts on Tuesday and Friday, both going live at 8pm CST. For my unwanted cards sake, I hope to see you there 😉

Take My Stuff Tuesday #1

Hey all, welcome to the inaugural Take My Stuff Tuesday!

For those that remember my old Free Stuff Friday's, these will be exactly the same, just a different name, and day.

For those unfamiliar, the concept is pretty simple, you just scroll down and claim any cards that you may want; it doesn't get much easier than that. I don't know how much interest there'll be, but in the interest of fairness, try to keep your claims to under 15 cards for the first couple of hours. If there's still a bunch of stuff that you want after that, feel free to go nuts.

I think I covered almost everything in last week's teaser post, but did forget to mention that if you're claiming something, and I've never sent anything to you before, please email your address when you get a chance: j t e f 8 2 at g mail . com (minus the spaces). It might be a good idea to do so if I haven't sent you anything in a couple of years as well, just in case.

You can type out your claims anyway you please, if you want to do the old 1-9, 2-6, etc., that'll be fine, of if you just want to say that you want whoever on page whatever, that works too.

I'll come back and update the post in the morning, and unless there's nothing else, I'll have another one of these up next Tuesday at the exact same time, 8pm CST (give or take a minute or two).

Updated version.

Page 1: Base cards

Claimed: 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

 Page 2: Ted Williams base cards

Claimed: All!

Page 3: Various Panini Cooperstown inserts

Claimed: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

Page 4: Base cards

Claimed: 1,2,3,6,7,8,9

Page 5: 1976 Wonder Bread All-Star Series

Claimed: 1,2,3,7,8,9

Page 6: Base cards

Claimed: All!

Page 7: Parallels

Claimed: All!

Page 8: Ichiro

Claimed: All!

Page 9: More Ichiro

Claimed: All!

Page 10: Even more Ichiro!

Claimed: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9

Page 11: TCMA Baseball's Greatest

Claimed: All!

Page 12: Parallels (The pink Bryant has a bit of a punky corner)

Claimed: All!

Page 13: Base Cards

Claimed: 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Page 14: Base Cards

Claimed: All!

"Page" 15: Odds and ends

Claimed: All!

Thanks for looking. I'll try to come back in the morning and update the post, that is if there's been any activity during the night of course.

Coming next Tuesday...

Do you like free cards? If so, you might want to be here next week for the first of what'll probably end up being 3 or 4 free stuff posts.

Some may remember my "Free Stuff Friday" posts from a few years ago (has it really been that long already?). They went over pretty well, and certainly helped me get rid of some unwanted stuff at the time. I find myself having quite a bit of unwanted cards again, so it seems like a good time to bring those back. 

I remember a couple of people saying way back when that Friday's weren't very good for them, so I'm gonna see how Tuesday's work instead. And because I've since learned that some people use certain feeds for blog reading that can sometimes take up to 24 hours to show the newest posts, and therefor might end up being terribly late for such a series of posts, I'm just gonna say in advance that the posts will be going live at roughly 8pm CST. Hopefully that'll make things a little easier for some of you.

In the past I've really only asked that you only claim cards for your collection, and not your trade pile, which I would still prefer (obviously I'm relying on the honor system with this); but this time I'd also like to ask that despite some of you probably wanting to, that you please don't send any cards in return. If you feel the need to reciprocate, just pay it forward by sending some cards to someone else. I'm sure that they'll appreciate them a lot more than I would right now.

And as has always been the case, everyone's free to play along, it don't matter where you live. Although, if you're outside the U.S., and claim enough to warrant a bubble mailer, you're cards will be sent via a couple of PWE's; it's just too expensive for me to send bubble mailers out of the country these days (it's almost getting too expensive to send them in-country as well).

I guess that just about covers everything. I can't say that the cards in these posts will be any better than those from years past, but there should still be a few decent things sprinkled about. So for those who may be interested, I'll see you next Tuesday...

Books, out of the blue!

I don't do books on here anymore (I have another blog for that, and other things), but two of them came in a surprise package the other day, and since they're sports related, and from someone whose primarily known (at least in our small blogging circle) for being a card blogger; I thought I'd make an exception.

Given his former place of employment (a bookstore), I'm not overly surprised that, Rod, the always generous soul behind Padrographs, would be sending out some books, I'm just surprised that some of those books would've made their way to me.

First up was "Baseball's Hometown Teams", which as I mentioned to Rod in a follow-up email, is a book that I had been hoping to come across in the wild for what seemed like years. 

There are not a lot of books out there that cover the minor leagues, and while I've been under impression that this one isn't the most in-depth of that small number, I've figured that it's still gonna cover some stuff that I don't know, and would therefor still be worth getting. Thanks to Rod, I no longer have to keep an eye out for it.

I would be very surprised if this second book didn't originally come from Rod's former bookstore (they sold ex-library books). I hadn't heard of this one before, but I'm sure that there's hundreds of baseball books that I haven't heard of, so that's not all that surprising. 

With very little synopsis here, I took a few pictures of the book's innards to give you some sense of what's going on inside...

I don't like reading similar topics one after another, so either of these will make for a nice 180 from the book that I'm currently reading, "Macbeth", once I'm finished. I'll probably go with the Hometown Teams, if only because I've wanted to read it for longer.

At this point in my life, books are probably my favorite thing to get in the mail, and even more so when they're unexpected. So, many thanks to, Rod, not only for sending said unexpected books, but also just for thinking of me in general; that means quite a bit, too!

An opportunity?

I got an email from COMC earlier today. Given it's nature, I thought it might be worth sharing for any interested parties who aren't on their mailing list.

I don't think that I need to say it, but I will anyway: I have no affiliation with COMC, nor am I endorsing this offer (not that my endorsement would mean very much anyway), I'm just passing it along. That's all.

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, and more Johnny!

I don't think that I'm telling most regular blog readers anything they don't already know, when I say that Johnny's Trading Spot has been a hotbed of activity for what seems like the better part of a year now. Of course, with nearly daily giveaways going on, that is to be suspected. If there's one thing that blog readers like, it's free cards. And with folks only having to comment on posts the day they go live, it's not that difficult to get qualified for a chance at a 9-card PWE.

In the early days of my blog reading, I was pretty good at being able to comment on posts within a few hours of them dropping, but in recent years I'm almost always 3-7 days behind. As such, I haven't been qualified for many of John's giveaways, maybe 10 (?) out of the 200 (?) that he's done so far. Surprisingly though, out of those 10 (?), I've actually won three. And seeing as how those three arrived quite a few months ago, I'm way overdue in giving proper thanks. Today I'm giving said thanks.

The first envelope was nine-pack of Junior, all of which turned out to be needed.

I rarely look for Junior on my own, so a few of these were new images to me as well, including the Topps Chrome here where 2010 Griffey looks like he ate the Score era version of himself.

Sometime between my first and second wins, John sent a bunch of people envelopes fully of original Wacky Packages for reasons that I can no longer remember. Since I was one of those people, please pardon the slight detour while I show most of those off...

I may not remember why I was included in these mailings, but I do remember when my envelope arrived, if only because I had had the Fruit of the Tomb and Snarlamint cards in my COMC watch list. They were there in the hopes that the person would be running a sale during the Black Friday sale, which at the time, was only days away from starting. I believe this envelope showed up the day before the sale started, which couldn't have been more timely if John had tried.

I even got part of a puzzle, which, when completed, will look like this...

I am not well versed at all in being able to tell the different WP series' apart. As such, these are still sitting in a stack, patiently waiting for me to get the sorting bug.

Back to the contest wins...

The second winning envelope started off with a Junior subset (?) that I wasn't familiar with. I only ever collected Collector's Choice in basketball form back in the 90's, so I'm constantly seeing cards from the baseball and football sets that are new to me. 

I had the silver signature version of both of these, so the images weren't new, but the base version of the cards were.

It seems like I only actively look for a handful of guys anymore, Boog being one of them, so to get three that I didn't have all at once was kind of nice.

It may be sun bleached, but this Reggie Roby auto was still a nice addition to his binder. I'd like to think that this was somebody's prize possession at some point, perhaps out on display for many years, hence the fading, but obviously there's no way to know for sure.

The third and, probably final, winning envelope was made up of nine cards from what appears to have been at least a 20-card Junior subset; which was once again new to me. Like a lot of folks, I miss certain things about cards from the 90's, but one thing that I don't miss is all of the subsets and insert sets that were devoted to a single person. Upper Deck was especially notorious for doing them, but was far from the only guilty party. I doubt that I'll ever go out of my way to complete this one, as a page of them seems like more than enough.

I don't know how he's been able to do it, but I'm sure that I speak for many others when I say thank you to John for running these giveaways. And from myself, thank you again for these four mailings. I'm way behind in trying to send some sort of reciprocal package, but am still slowly working on it.

A little slice of childhood

Alligator is a film that I consider to be staple of my childhood. I can't recall the exact details from the first time I saw it at this point, but do know that it was via a rented video while staying the night at someone's house back in the late 80's. I do recall quite vividly though that the movie was pretty scary to an under 8 year-old me.

It wouldn't be until we got cable in 1993 that I saw it again. By that time, it was being shown quite regularly on the Sci-Fi channel, and would continue to be for the next few years. It was no longer scary at that point, but even so, if you had asked a then 11 year-old Jon, he would've listed it as one of his ten favorite movies (it has since dropped down the ladder a bit, but not as far as you might think).

The films practical effects probably don't hold up to a generation that's been raised on CGI, the shoestring budget is visible in places, and some of the acting is a bit over the top (Henry Silva clearly had fun with his role), but this particular cranky old man wouldn't change a thing. I love everything about the film.

Jaws is often credited with "scaring a nation out of the water". Well, along similar lines, Alligator could be credited with scaring 80's kids away from jumping (or pushing someone else) into unlit swimming pools at night 💀

Robert Forster has many fine credits to his name, but to me he'll always be Detective David Madison, the balding anti-hero that tried, mostly in vain, to warn everyone about the giant Alligator roaming around underneath the streets of Chicago.

I had bid, and lost out on, many copies of this card before finally winning one early last year. I think mine was around $18 shipped, which was a bit of money, but not anywhere near the $30-50 that all of the previous copies ended at that I had bid on. If memory serves, this one ended on a Sunday night, so that may've played a role in my getting it for much less than it had been going for at the time.