They make ointments for that

I sure hope this wasn't one of those nickname variations...

... if so, I really don't want to know how he came to be called that. 🙉

Honesty is always the best policy

Kudos to SP Authentic for being, well, authentic when it came to describing these designs.

And for the record, I agree; these were mediocre at best.

News you can use

Just a head's up for those that might be interested, there's now a non-sport category over on Sportlots. 

This has been a few years in the making, so it's kind of exciting to see it finally being implemented. I was pleasantly surprised by how many cards have already been listed, especially since today is it's launch day. I've already done two small orders, and was able to pick up some of my more wanted cheap cards. I suspect that these were just the first two of what will be many future all non-sport orders made by me on there.

That's all I've got for today. I'll try to get a real post up sometime soon.

I can see how this might work

Courtesy of The Californian 9/20/48

New blog

I don't know how much interest there'll be, but I started a new blog earlier this week. I wasn't sure if I was gonna promote it on here or not, especially since someone already found it on their own. After thinking about it though, I guess mentioning it once wouldn't hurt. So if you feel like checking it out, that'd be cool. If not, that's cool too.

For what it's worth, it'll probably be my main blog from now on, or at least it will be very shortly. I'm moving all of my fun (for me) topics over there, and will just stick to cards and sports on here going forward. 

I will try to keep up with my current schedule on here of a post per week, or every other week. My heart hasn't been in it for most of this year so far. Aside from listing things on eBay, I haven't been doing any card related activities (I don't count blog posts as a card related activity) as of late, and don't think that I have done any during the last month or two. I'm sure my interest level will pick back up at some point, but until then, don't be too surprised if this blogs posts continue to drift more into filler territory

So yeah, anyway, new blog; not the same as the old blog...

Getting too smart for it's own good

I noticed my phone doing a curious thing while texting with my mom this past weekend. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I will not be posting screen shots of the text conversation. I did however, go to Google to see if this curiosity would replicate itself, which it did, so I'll be posting those grabs instead.

I was getting ready to type "replying" during our conversation, and couldn't help but notice the first thing that popped up in the auto-suggest (auto-fill?) box after I typed the "r". Despite being in mid conversation, I took a second to follow the phone's lead, and tapped on the "Reggie", which brought up a delightful, if not totally unexpected, result...

Google may not know what's up, but my phone clearly does. And for record, no, I didn't leave Reggie Roby's name just randomly placed in the conversation.

It's also worth pointing out that while my phone may be syncing up with my being, Google seems to be going in the opposite direction. Need proof? Just look at those three suggested items on the first screen. "restaurants near me" Really? In all my years of internetting, I have not once sought out an eatery near me, or anywhere else for that matter. "russia ukraine"? Yeah, right! Why would I, or anyone else, be seeking out something that's currently on the home page of just about every single website. And "Regions Bank", I don't even know what that is -- aside from being a bank of some sort. Those are searches for boring people. You want interesting searches, look at the first three on that screen, those are all me! Granted, I only remember doing one of the three, but still, at least they've got soul. "restaurants near me"... GTFOH with that lame-ass suggestion!

I guess it's just you and me, phone. Nobody gets me like you do :)

A funny from the past

I finally started reading the copy of "The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" that I got a couple of months back. It's very good so far. The layout is absolutely perfect for a scatterbrain like me. I'm about halfway through as of this typing, but would already recommend it highly for any baseball history buffs out there.

I don't read a lot of things that make me laugh out loud anymore, but there's an anecdote in this book that did, and I feel like it's worth sharing (even though I haven't gotten permission to do so).

A bit of context for those that may not know, Hughie Jennings is a former player, a HOF player, and was the then Tigers manager.

I love it! Stories like this could only come from that era. There will be nothing like this in a hundred years about today's players. I just wish that we knew the kid's name.

Also, because I'm always interested in what the cost of past things would be today, that $1.80 ticket back in 1916 would, as of right now, be $46.43 in 2022.

This was a bit of a throwaway post, I know, but it's all I've got for today. I'll have a real post up sometime in the next few days.

It wasn't that bad

Every card company has made their share of dumb cards over the years, but to my knowledge, none of them have ever publically admitted to doing so before. At least that's what I had thought...

Personally, I don't see why Upper Deck was so down on this card. Sure, the autographs are on stickers, but it's hardly the worst looking stickergraph I've ever seen. And yet, Upper Deck, for whatever reason, felt the need to let everyone know exactly how they felt about it -- even going so far as to print their critique right on the back of the actual card itself!

You can't make this stuff up

I don't care what anyone says, there is no way that Isaiah Pead...

... could've gotten this card number by "accident".

You said it!

I don't know if anyone's noticed or not, but soccer's popularity in the U.S. seems to be on the increase. It had already been trending upward pre-corona, but that growth has increased ten-fold over the last year or so. It's gotten to the point where people are even paying large sums for soccer cards now. Soccer cards!

No one asked, but for the record, just in case anyone ever did; I don't care how popular it gets, or how valuable the cards become, in my mind the "sport" will always be...

When you gotta go, you gotta go

                           
Imagine being selected for the Hall of Fame in your chosen sport, and a card company decides to honor that achievement by producing something with this card number...

Hopefully it was just an oversight, and not an opinion of his worthiness on Upper Deck's part. 

On the positive side though , I guess he should be thankful that it wasn't one of those nickname cards :)

Feel the love... I dare you!

                                                               Happy          

                                        Day!

My ship has finally come in!

Well, kids, it's happened, I've just hit the big one.

The full magnitude of this pull hasn't quite sunk in yet, but I figure that I'm basically rich now, so it's gonna be easy living from here on out. On a related note, does anyone know of any islands for sale?

And don't worry, I won't forgot about my blogging friends. I'll make a note to remind myself to think of you as I'm sipping Mai Tai's next to Marisa Tomei 😎

Don't say I didn't warn you

I got a hair crosswise last night, and decided to start entering some of my player collections into the TCDB. I know, it's bonkers, right?

I don't imagine that I'll be doing any trading, but keeping track of these collections on paper just isn't doable, and my memory is not such that I can instantly recall every single card I have when I need to, so this seems like the only real option available for me at this time.

I'm thinking that maybe every couple of days or so I'll enter a handful of players, that way I don't have to take myself away from anything else during the process. I'm starting with football, if only because it should go the quickest, then I'll move to baseball, and finish with basketball, as that's going to be the most time consuming of the bunch. In less than an hour last night, I was able to add Reggie Roby, Ronnie Lott, Steve Atwater, and Dennis Smith. I'm thinking that I probably should've been able to do more in that amount of time, but oh well, at least I kind of know what to do now.

I don't plan on adding everything I own, some things I can remember, and some things I don't need a bunch of strangers knowing that I own. I'd like to add some older non-sports stuff too, but after a brief looking, I see a number of sets that I have cards from that aren't even on the site. I guess those will be for the paper lists then, as I don't see myself trying to add any set checklists to the site, that sounds much too complicated for someone like me.

I know that this isn't terribly interesting, and might not seem post worthy, but things have a habit of going downhill, especially those of the online variety, once I start using them, so I just wanted to give everyone fair warning. MySpace (I joined way back when just so I could listen to two exclusive tracks from an upcoming album, but still, it went to poop right after I joined), Wensy, COMC, and Blogger, are just a few examples of things that started to decline after I joined them. Speaking of COMC, I don't know if you've heard or not, but there's been some chatter in the last couple of days that they're going to go ahead and do the Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, sale. I don't think many people thought that they would, given their struggles this year, but supposedly it's going to be announced this weekend. They seem to be the only company that's still using the Rona as an excuse for poor service, and with things flaring up again, I don't know how they're going to pull this off. They're obviously not going to be providing any shipping discounts like in years past, and considering that pretty much everything left on the site has increased in price by at least 50% since everyone started cOlLeCtInG again, I don't how exciting a bunch of 10% sales are gonna be. And that's not even taking into account all of the people who'll be raising their prices, only then to put them on sale for more than they're currently listed at. But whatever, I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, TCDB, yeah, I hope everyone has hard copies of their lists, because I'm fully expecting Beckett to come along and buy the site (or some sort of other disastrous occurrence) now that I'm using it, so I just wanted to make sure that no could ever say that I didn't warn them. The only good thing is, whatever terrible happening that's going to befall the site, won't do so until after I'm completely done adding my collections -- and at the pace I'm gonna go, I probably won't finish until 2023, so you've got a few more years to get your stuff in order. 😊

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

For Asgard!

It's not everyday that see you an athlete triumphantly holding up the head of a slain giant.

A belated, but very hearty, congratulations goes out to Vance Johnson on his victory; one would  imagine that Odin must've been quite pleased with this outcome.

A new era?

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I've gotten more than a few compliments over the years for this blog's title (and let's be honest, it is the best thing about this blog), which is nice, I guess, but even so, I've thought about changing it quite a few times in recent memory. The only problem is... I can't seem to come up with another catchy title.

I haven't spent a great deal of time trying to think of a new name for the blog, which as it turns out, may have been a blessing, because it would appear that a hairy little fellow from Melmac, may have already done on all of the hard work for me, and even more impressive; he did it all the way back in 1987! ALF knew! He came up with a solution to my problem decades before I even had the problem!

So what do we think, A Whisker For Your Thoughts? Has an oddly familiar ring to it, but I think I like it!

Switching titles will probably require a slight change in content though, I'm thinking that the blog's gonna need a little bit more of this...

... and little less of this...

Definitely more of this...

... meaning there'd be a lot less of this...

I'd most certainly have to start spending more time discussing things like this...

... which would drastically reduce the time spent on things like this... 

It'd be a big change, that's for sure. The question is though, would such a change be welcomed?

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

Deal of the century

I think that everyone knows all about eBay's super fantastic once-in-a-lifetime coupon by now, right? The $25 off of a purchase of $25.01 or more coupon, yes? Technically it's still going on, so I guess if you somehow hadn't heard about it, you've still got time.

I found out about it last weekend during a brief (very brief as it would turn out) stop over on the Twitter. It was one of those things that you really couldn't miss, as the usual bickering and complaining had seemingly been put on hold for one night, only to be replaced by a series of collective orgasms from the card community, the seeing of which made me instantly long for the days of bickering and complaining -- it truly was that gross.

Not being above influence, I managed to pry myself away from the all of the fluids that were being virtually exchanged, and made my way to everyone'e  "favorite" auction site. Not having anything above $25.01 in my watch list, as well as not holding out much hope of this manna applying to yours truly, I just found, and subsequently added, some random expensive thing to my cart. After all, I'm not gonna waste a bunch of time looking for something, only to find out that the code doesn't work for me.

So, I got my expensive item in cart, went to the checkout, added the HAPPY25 code into the promotions box, hit the 'apply', and...

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Geez, what part of "wait for it" don't you understand? :)

Okay, moment of truth...

What? WHAT??? That's bulljive! Is this discrimination? Am I being discriminated against? Is it because I'm Irish? Is eBay anti Irish? Never in all my years... someone get Johnny Cochrane on the blower, I think I've got a case for him!

I sincerely hope that no one thinks that I'm being serious, I mean it's true that the code didn't work for me, but everything else is just me f*cking around, oh, but that part about Twitter was true as well, and it was a bit disturbing.

So, while the code didn't work for me, which really wasn't that disappointing, as I didn't relish the thought of spending hours on eBay trying to find something (something too that was actually reasonably priced, just cause it's free money, doesn't mean I would've been rewarding anyone's bad behavior by buying their stupidly high priced item), but I do hope that it worked for everyone else, you deserved it!

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.