Too Many Hobbies

Fuji's homework assignment for this week is to show off your other non-sport related hobbies. Asking me this to do this is kinda like asking Shawn Kemp to show off all his children. Over the past 40 years I've managed to get interested in a whole lot of things. A lot were sports related, especially gaming so I'll skip the video and board games and magazines and fantasy sports and et cetera and keep it to just the stuff that impacted my life that had nothing to do with sports. I literally have 15 minutes to write this up after scanning and photoing all this stuff today so I'm just gonna jump to it and pray that the formatting doesn't break again. 

I pretty much learned to read from Peanuts Fawcett Paperbacks. I've accumulated a bookshelf full in my travels. This one here is one I had when I was a wee lad. It was chewed by my asshole dog who is probably responsible for my current racism toward canines. I also went through a period where I would circle my favorite letter in my books. This book was brought to you by the letter 'R'.

At some point I got my hands on my uncle's old Mad Magazines from the early '70s and started reading them too. I must admit that my political views were heavily influenced by Mad Magazine. Sadly, most of those magazines were lost in a Great Purge of my bedroom, but I still have this one that I picked up in the '80s. This is one of my all time favorite MAD covers. 

I was INSANE over Star Wars when I was about 8 or 9. I forced my parents to let me watch BattleStar Galactica because it kinda looked like Star Wars. My favorite cartoon for a while was G-Force because 7-Zark-7 looked a bit like R2D2. Again, many figures were lost, but I still have Han and a bounty hunter to go along with my new(er) Han and a bounty hunter. 

In 1983 I went berzerk over baseball cards. To try to steer me into something more sensible, my mother gave me her old coin collection. It worked for a few years, but by '86 I was lost to cardboard again. I still  really love old coins though. My cat was actually named after this coin here. 

Stamps. For a brief and crazy period I became obsessed with stamps. I am generally ashamed of and regret this wild behavior today. There is one quirky habit I still have today thanks to stamps. When I get a letter with an actual stamp on it, I instinctively rip off the stamp and save it. You know, because it's so valuable. Here's a stamp of a guava that looks vaguely filthy.

Here is a book cover that is genuinely filthy. This book cover is pretty par for the course for the '70s though. I love love loved to read as a kid and picked up all sorts of crazy sci-fi and horror stuff. I picked this one out to show off on this post not for the cover but because this is genuinely a really good dystopian type sci-fi novel that no one has probably ever heard of. It's about the future (natch) where people get their brains put in jars and then they work out all their problems while existing only as a brain and then they reach Enlightenment and their brain gets put into an actual person and they live out their days in a peaceful utopia but the everyone feels sorry for the first person who was ever jarbrained because he is still a fucking mess after all these years so they let him have a body anyway and HIJINKS ENSUE! Lotta great old crappy books out there if you look!

I also love space, especially the space shuttle. I snagged this shuttle mission token on one of my many trips to the Kennedy Center or the Space Museum in Huntsville. The combo of coins + space was too much to resist.

Comics! I love comics. Not the spandex superhero type though. I liked the House of Mystery type horror comics and space comics and funny comics when I was a kid. When I hit High School I picked up a ton of cheap independent comics at the local comic shop. Most were oddball stuff but I managed to pick up quite a lot of Fantagraphics comics cheap including Love and Rockets, Peter Bagge's Hate and this #1 Lloyd Llewellyn by Daniel Clowes. This may very well be the greatest comic book cover of all time. There is probably a 50-50 shot I break down and do a comics Tumbler in the next calendar year. 

Can't forget the music! Ever since I got an Eddy Grant and a Men At Work cassette tape at K-Mart in 1982 I've been in love with music. I have boxes of cassettes, piles of CDs, folders full of MP3s and a couple of crates of LPs. Here is the most ridiculous and offensive album I own: a Bootleg of the Beatles in Hamburg entitled The Beatles vs the Third Reich. According to the back the audience responses to the Beatles' songs include "Seig Heil" "Your Papers, Please" and my favorite, "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Penis". 

In the '90s, Magic: the Gathering hit and I eventually got caught up in all the CCG stuff thanks to Decipher's Star Wars game. This was probably the first CCG guide I ever got, mainly just for the free Star Wars cards. I now have a pile of them I have no idea what to do with. 

Fast forward to present day and now I like ponies. Lord knows what the hell my basement is going to look like if I live another 40 years....

Instant Karma

I recently received a package of football cards from Jack Plumstead at The Pursuit of 80'sness. I had offered a hostage exchange program between our two shores. He send me some World Cup Cards and I'll fly over some baseball goodies. I'm hoping to video the cards he sent, but I haven't had the time to work the kinks out of my new setup yet. In the meantime, I went over to Target to a) look for a Goodwin blaster and b) pick up some packs to send to Jolly ol' England. I found plenty of Goodwin - 2009 Goodwin. Having failed in that, I picked up a rack of Gypsy Queen, a hanger of Topps 2 and a few random packs. I split the rack and hanger between Jack and myself. Out of one of the packs of Gypsy Queen came this:

This is one of those shiny Bronze framed cards numbered to 999. I am going to send this over with the packs so I blocked out the name and number. You know, so it can be a surprise. This was good for Jack. The next card was good for me:

Omar Infante short print. Wait - that's a really short print. #01/10? PALINDROME-JO! Here's the front.

Awwww yeah. stamp card in a retail rack. I've done better with retail Gypsy than I ever would dropping 150 bones on a hobby box. Just think, I never would have bought it had I not been looking for packs for Jack. And no, I'm not going to tell you the one store in Georgia that still has Gypsy Queen racks and blasters. Not gonna be that altruistic.

Two more racks of Heritage

Here's highlights of two more of those Heritage Rack Packs I found last week. The first one was kind of boring so I'm showing off another one too. Of course now I need to find a fifth to pair up with the last rack pack. Of course I've bought four more since then since I haven't seen blasters yet. Of course you'd like me to shut up and get on with it already. So I will.

Pack 2:

Tommy Hanson

Great googely moogely I love this rookie cup card. the only Heritage card I could possibly love more than this one is the Jason Heyward card that will come out in the High Numbers set later this year.

Yaz Debut Flashback

This was the only insert in the pack which seems like sort of a rip to me. Then again, it is one of the best inserts possible and I also got Braveage action, so I'm not complaining this time. Yaz is on the short list of non-braves players I really like.

Chipper Jones

I bought eight hobby packs and got one Chipper Jones. So far I've bought eight rack packs and I've gotten one Chipper Jones. Chipper Jones is apparently in one in every eight packs.

Javier Vazquez

I'm not as insences as the rest of the state at having to give up Javy, but I'll be honest with ya. I'd rather have three more years of Tim Hudson than one more year of Javier Vazquez. I'd rather have both of them and blister-footed Derek Lowe elsewhere of course, but you can't have everything.

Pack 3

The last pack was pretty boring, this one is much more interesting.

Topps Stamps Carlos Quentin and Gerardo Parra

Here it is, the fabled '61 Stamp card. The ones whose coolness are mitigated by the difficulty of their pull. At 1:108 packs, it is over three times easier to pull a jersey card than one of these things. The stamps are enclosed inside a plastic frame and are not sliding around in there, indicating to me that they are stuck. The back is numbered out of 50, I've put it in my binder already and it's in the other room and I'm too lazy to get it so don't worry about the actual number on the back. Yeah this card looks really nice. At the risk of earning the wrath of a certain Sox fan, I'm going to say that this particular specimen is not all that impressive. It's kind of like pulling an original '61 stamp panel of Vic Wertz and Jerry Lumpe. Why Topps didn't just put one panel of unframed stamps in every pack and them give out a stamp album as a box topper, I simply do not know. Topps has stamps in the '62 set so maybe they will get it right next time.

Jamie Moyer

I posted this card for two reasons. To try to lure Dinged Corners away from studying for a moment or two, and because The Aged One is looking pretty majestic on that card. So, Is Moyer even a possibility for the Hall of Fame or is he the to the '90s and '00s what Frank Tanana was to the '70s and '80s? Discuss.

Checklist

I'm not a huge fan of the '61 set, but DAMN did they have some mighty fine checklists. Not even the unfortunate photograph can spoil the perfection of this checklist.

2009 National League Home Run Leaders

2009 NL HR Leaders: Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder, Ryan Howard, Mark Reynolds.
1961 NL HR leaders: Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Ken Boyer, Eddie Mathews.

One you're done yelling "Moyer in the Hall?? You must be mad!" you can all discuss which group is better instead.

2010 Topps Heritage Box Toppers

You all know Atlanta Sports Cards as that site where you can get cheap boxes, but I know them as the shop that puts boxtoppers in the 50 cent bin. On a recent trip there I snagged some of the new Heritage strip toppers.

Topps has put these in their Heritage hobby boxes since 2008. It is basically a strip of three random cards uncut so it is impossible to safely store. As far as I can tell they aren't terribly popular, probably because of their clunkiness and because even obsessive team collectors don't have much use for them. What Cardinal collector would want a dirty Cub on their LaRussa card? Carlos Quentin won't even acknowledge the inferior team from his city to his right. Dempster feels like the guy in the middle seat on an airplane with two with Kevin Smith on one side and, well, me on the other.

The backs have ads for 2010 Heritage on them. Because, you, know, you might really want to learn about this new product you just bought 5 minutes earlier. Strips like these were given out as premiums to shop owners to get them to stock Topps cards back in the late 50's. That's what I heard at least, there isn't a whole lot of information out there on them. One thing I regret about today's collecting culture is that people won't automatically cut these strips up into three separate cards anymore. Maybe in 5 or 10 years from now eBay crooks will do so in order to market them as SUPER RAER 1/1 SOOPER SHORT PRNIT!!! Actually, I could cut this one up and have two of them traded off in a half a second. That would leave me with a Cub though... ew. No thanks.

Topps switched things up this year and added a second box topper. This one features two of their depressingly impossible to find stamp insert set from one team on a strip. The stamps aren't real, but are printed on the card. So Topps' #1 priority is to market to kids, and instead of making the stamps a cheap one per pack insert and including a stamp album as a box topper, they make it a 1 in a hundred something packs framed insert numbered to 50 each and throw these at us instead. Yep, marketing to kids right there... kids eat that shit right up.

For adults this isn't a bad insert set at all, especially for team collectors. The front features a couple of stars from one team and the back is chock full of team info. Why don't Topps add these strips to blasters? Back in the day, dang near every blaster had a jumbo sized insert in it. I guess now that they have no competition, they will be able to do such innovative things. Right?

Stamp out Procrastination

Ok, so I've been slacking. I've got packages to send, Pirate card sets to put together. old cards to show off, sets to collate, e-mails to respond to, neat stuff to post. And I ain't done none of it. I didn't even post my happy birthday tribute to Margaret Thatcher yesterday. In my defense, between traffic, work, kids, studying and my required 5 hours of fitful sleep a night, there's not much time to blog. I'm not going two straight days without posting something so here's a stamp.

1962 Topps stamp of the best Milwaukee Braves catcher of all time, Del Crandall. These little stickies were inserted into Topps packs in panels of two players. You can see some of Del's panel partner on the right.This stamp has a little piece of a Clete Boyer or Ray Sadecki stamp. Bonus! This is my third stamp from the 200 player set and Del joins fellow Brave Roy McMillan and an off center Milwaukee Braves logo. I got this stamp this weekend from the same dealer I got the logo stamp from. I've got 15 more posts from that haul, I should be done with them by August, 2014. That might be the next time I buy cards again too the way things are going. Of course this stuff is apparently live, so it's not like I'm missing much.