He's got my vote

I know that there's a couple of websites out there that do awards for various things, including blog of the year, at the end of each year. And I seem to recall that right around the time I started blogging myself, that there was a blog, or blogs, that gave out individual awards, but I don't think I ever actually saw any of those results, and have never heard anyone even mention winning one of those categories.

I'm not too keen on the idea of crowning any particular blog, "The Blog of the Year", or best blog, or whatever you want to call it. There are an awful lot of great blogs, most of which are unique in their own way, which is of course what makes them so great. I would argue that no blog is "better" than another, as that's very subjective, and plays on favoritism for my liking. By saying a blog is the "best", also makes me think that the voter is implying that if they could only read one blog, it would be that "best" blog. How one dimensional of you! If I could only read one blog, I'd choose no blog. I need variety. I need personalities, lots of personalities! I need multiple viewpoints. I'm not looking to replicate the China experience, where we have just one state sponsored blog, and you shouldn't be either. Being involved with the blogs (as a "writer" or reader) is great because you become part of a community, not an individual.

Now don't get me wrong, I may be opposed to saying that any one blog is "the blog of the year", but that doesn't mean that I'm opposed to awards in general, on the contrary, I actually really like the idea of handing out individual awards. Not only does it give a number of people a chance to "win" something, but more importantly, it recognizes many blogs, as well as their owners. Anyone is capable of writing an awesome post, or creating a memorable series, so why shouldn't they be recognized with a "Post of the Year" or "Series of the Year" award? If someone was willing to undertake such an affair, and put together some sort of Blogger awards (I don't think that anyone is going to volunteer to do so though), any number of categories could be created, from the silly to the serious, but at least when all was said and done, many people would end up being celebrated, not just one.

I'm sure a few of you might be wondering where I'm going with all of this, so let me tell you.

I started thinking about this subject while looking through my most recent purchase, which just so happens to have been 167 cards from the BASEBALLCARDSTORE.CA, a site that pretty much everyone involved with the blogs only knows about because of Trevor, from the Bump and Run Football Card Blog. He was the first to purchase from them, as well as the first to post about them, which has led to a countless number of other bloggers, and blog readers, to buy from them as well. So with that in mind, I couldn't help but think that if we were giving out awards, Trevor would surely be a shoo-in for "Assist of the Year", I know he'd have my vote. In a year where card shows have been scarce, card shops have been shuttered, COMC has been a hot mess, and eBay has devolved into a radioactive dumpster fire; the baseballcardstore has been a beacon of light for card collectors, and a lot of us have Trevor to thank for that beacon. [I'm thinking that the owners of the site should be compensating Trevor in some way as well, at least give him a discount, or free shipping, something!]

I fully admit to not being overly impressed on my first trip to the site after Trevor's initial post, and had much difficulty with the search feature. I found a couple of cards, but not enough to warrant an order. I was happy to celebrate everyone else's purchases, but had pretty much given up hope of me ever buying anything from them. That was until a few weeks back, when I decided to try and give the site another go. I ended up having less difficulty using their search feature, and started finding cards, lots of cards!

Given how many problems I've had in buying from places where you can't see the cards (I'm looking at you, Sportlots), I was a little hesitant to buy anything lest the cards ended up being in terrible condition. Thankfully I know of a fellow who I could trust to give me an honest answer about such things, so I sent off a quick email to Chris, who promptly vouched for the site, and the overall condition of their cards -- which was all I needed to start buying!

They've got a new layaway feature, which is really nice, it's basically like COMC, where you can just buy a bunch of crap, have them hold it, rinse and repeat, and then have all of your stuff shipped together when your ready. I did this over about a week, which gave me plenty of time to find a lot of really need things. Things like Panini stickers from '94 and '96, neither of which I had ever seen before, as I had stopped buying stickers by that point.

If you're buying from a site based out of Canada, it only makes sense to get some O-Pee-Chee (you'll have to trust me on the '91).

Having finished with my year long sort a few months ago, and finding that I'm mostly interested in only player collecting at this point, I pretty much just focused on certain players for the first purchase. The only problem I had was that I had finished sorting the baseball keepers first, so all of those binders and boxes are at the bottom of the card piles, and I've since unpacked a number of toy boxes, the contents of which are mostly piled up in front of said said binders and boxes, which has made them almost impossible to get to. So I had to go off of memory for the most part, which didn't work out so well, because I couldn't remember sh*t. I did the best I could, but still ended up with a lot less baseball than I had planned.

Is it just me, or do these two cards look really good side-by-side?

I told myself that I wasn't going spend more than $20 on this first order, I ended up spending $21.70 overall, which I guess is close enough.

I also told myself that I wasn't going to scan everything, and subject all of you to multiple posts worth of stuff... that didn't work out either! Seeing as how this was my largest card purchase of the year (strange year), and unless I hit up a show sometime soon (they start back up next month), may end up being my largest card purchase of the year, so you're just gonna have to indulge me in couple of "look what I got" posts (although this ones getting pretty wordy for a "look" post). Although for the record, I didn't scan everything for the coming basketball and football posts, just most of it :)

Why is it that sometimes Metal scans really well, and other times it doesn't? And I couldn't get it to show up very well, but the UD Boone is one of those gold hologram ones, which if I remember from the blogs correctly, were exclusive to the box sets. This site seems to have introduced the existence of these to a lot of people, myself included.

I wasn't collecting cards when UD Vintage came out, which is probably a good thing, because as far as the throwback sets go, it may be one of the weaker entries. The extreme closeup of this oft used Lou Boudreau photo didn't help their cause, it's an ugly card, but it's a Lou that I didn't have, and it was only a dime, so...

It's a stretch to refer to this as a Junior card, but that's what the site called it, and that's what I'll call it. I suspect that pretty much all of the Junior cards have been gotten by this point, provided of course they ever had any to begin with.

And that does it for the baseball portion of the order, like I said, I didn't get very far on that front. Since were already here, and I've got a little bit of time to kill, I might as well tuck a couple of non-sport cards in here at the end, minus the ALF sticker that led off the last post (I wish that they would've had more of those).

I decided sometime last year that I wanted to start a few non-sport "player" collections, since Venom and Carnage are two of my favorite comic baddies of all time (Carnage might be my absolute favorite), they seemed like obvious choices to collect. As usual though, I picked the worst possible time to do so, as it was just a few months later that the announcement was made that Carnage would appear in the Venom sequel, and people doing what they do, started buying all the Carnage cards in sight. Apparently those same people did this when the first Venom film came out, and even though it's almost universally disliked, they haven't slowed down much with their buying.

I put together the Marvel Universe series 2 set (technically speaking it's the sixth series, as most people seem to ignore the first four series' that started in 1987) back in 1991 when it was released. At one time I had almost a couple more sets of duplicates, but have given away pretty much all of them over the years, so when it came time to this Venom collection, the only one I had left was in my set, and I wasn't about to pull it out -- thankfully the site took care of my dilemma.

I used some of my birthday money to buy a box of Marvel Universe series 3 back in '92, and have had a complete set since then. And just like the previous series, had lots of duplicates, but have given them all away.

Here's one for the liars, drunks, and loonies binder; aka the Barrymore family binder. I don't really have such a binder, but am now intrigued by the idea. I have no affinity for Batman Forever, but do like this card. Shout out to Spyda-Man, if he hadn't shown a few of the BF holograms from his order, I would've never thought to check the site for them (or any other holograms).

And finally, the only card that I've ever wanted from the Fangoria set, but have never been able to find cheap. Thanks go out to dayf for this one, like the Barrymore hologram above, I would've never thought to check for this had the Cardboard Junkie not mentioned it while recapping his purchase from the site. For the record too, outside of the first couple of issues, Fangoria is my least favorite monster magazine, Rue Morgue is high up on that list too, but at least Rue has done a few interesting history-based articles over the years, Fangoria is just blood and guts, with a heavy emphasis on the guts.

If you're still here, I'd like to mention that I'll be doing a "thing" here on the blog a week from today, since it'll be a Friday, you should probably be able to guess what kind of "thing" it's going to be, although this "thing" will be a tad different from previous similar "things". So if you like "things", you might want to try and be here around 5:30pm (Central Time) next Friday.

And as far as the rest of this baseballcardstore stuff goes, I'm going to try and have the basketball portion up on Sunday, and then close it out with the football some time next week. Neither sport is very popular with blog readers, so it'll be interesting to me to see which one does better, I'm thinking that the football will, but I could be wrong.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.