Easter Baskets

Happy Easter!  We went to church tonight to help reduce the over-crowding usually experienced on Easter-day services.  But that doesn't mean we won't be celebrating in the morning!

One way of celebrating:  My wife prepped Easter baskets for each of my little boys...but I had to add a little something to each of theirs to really make it great. :-)  #CardIndoctrination

A Foolish Decision Pays Off

To get a particular card for your collection quickly,  you really should just find it online and click buy-it-now.

It's never smart to buy packs looking for one particular card.  The vast majority of the time you end up several dollars poorer and holding a stack of cards you don't want.  Plus, there are probably Giants and Cardinals in that stack (ewwww....).

There are still blasters of 2015 Topps Series Two floating around out there in retail-world, and they each contain one of the "First Home Run" medallion manu-relics.  I was at Target with my son, and we were looking for something fun to bust together.  The side panel of the blaster box had the checklist for the medallion cards, and there were THREE Royals on there.   Alex Gordon, Bo Jackson, and Carlos Beltran -- A, B, and C.  Getting a "Gordo" would be ideal, but any of them would be great to pull from the box.

I put the Series Two blaster and a Fairfield Repack -- the six-year-old LOVES Panini Triple Play -- into the cart and we headed home.

The first thing we opened was the Blaster.  The guaranteed hit comes in its own opaque wrapper.  We cracked it open, and found this:

2015 Topps - First Home Run Relic - Alex Gordon

 
There was lots of screaming and giggling between us.  I won't say who giggled more.

So there you have it -- sometimes a foolish decision turns out to be the right one.  :-)

Christie Brinkley...

...Irradiating your balls since 1996.

1996 Pinnacle Christie Brinkley Collection #8 - Marquis Grissom

And she looks so happy about doing it to poor Marquis!

Sadist.

GERONIMO!!!!

I think he should go by Geronimo Jansen instead...

It Only Cost Me $1...

...to confirm that Anna Kournikova is indeed a "10."

2003 Netpro Tennis - #10 - Anna Kournikova - Graded

He's Back!

A4!  The one-and-only!

Let's Celebrate!

 

Cigarette Cards - The Ginter of the Past (and the Future?)

I recently saw a link that the New York Public Library had digitized their giant collections of cigarette cards.  The navigation panel on the side of that page has hundreds of different sets that you can look at, ranging from historical notables, "beauties", flowers, ships, animals, birds, military, etc.  If you are interested in any way at the "oddball" (non-baseball) parts of Allen and Ginter, set aside a little time and go for a browse through that archive.

While I have not looked at all of them yet, my personal favorite thus far was the "How To Do It" sets (Set 1 and Set 2) from Gallaher's Cigarettes.  

The first card I liked was "How to Draw an Ellipse" (seen above).  The front of each card features the drawing showing you what to do, and the back features the descriptive text like this:

This is the kind of knowledge we need today!!  You could put these out on a subset of Allen and Ginter and give people instructions so they wouldn't have to use that new-fangled internet.

That set also included:

How to draw a duck with the pencil still on the paper:

How to judge the freshness of a lobster:

How to bandage your foot:

How to read the gas meter:

How to tie Useful Knots:

Having done a lot of camping when I was younger, we learned a lot of knots for various uses.  This is the subject matter that I would LOVE to see replicated in an upcoming subset of  Allen and Ginter.  Please make it happen, Topps!

Comment:  After looking through that archive, what cigarette card set did you like the best, or what would you like to see on a future Ginter subset?