Cars, Not Chocolate Bars

Attended the Fall Hershey car show in Hershey, PA (yep, chocolate town) for the second time on October 7.  It is the largest and most diverse display of automotive history in real life that I've ever seen.  The show field is divided into decades and there are also sections that group certain makes and models too.  Took me four hours just to walk by them all.  Presented here in no particular order....

What's your favorite? Muscle cars? 50's cruisers?  Mustangs? 'Vettes? the elegant 1930's? Model T's? Let me know in the comments.

Shiny Autos

How's that for a clickbait title?

I've got hundreds of photos from the car shows I took the Buick to this summer.  Figured I'd throw some of the highlights up on here.  

(Those of you expecting foilboard signatures ~ sorry.)

First, my car among the participants:

And the rest of the exhibits:

Those are just a few of the better group shots I took.  I have tons of individual car shots I'll put up in future posts.  Let me know what eras, types or styles are your favorites and I'll try to post some themed groups.

The Old Fogies We Like

Hi guys, sorry it's been a while again.  Missed the whole month of October.  Been at more car shows than card shows, but actually have been to one of those too.  I just didn't buy much of anything worth showing off.  I got bored again and placed another order of mostly football player collection parallel fill-ins from COMC, but it says they won't ship until just before Christmas.  I guess that's progress.

Anyway, I also was perusing eBay the other week and saw a cheap auction for 1990 Elite Senior League sets.  That is the one Senior League set that I didn't have all my player collection guys from.  I've never come across singles in the wild and didn't want to break up the set I had. 

Since it was even cheaper to get multiple sets instead of just one, I got three of them for like six bucks each.  They are all still wrapped.  When I pulled out the one I already had, it wasn't, so I broke that one up.  I put one of the new sets in my cabinet to replace mine.  So that leaves two more and the remaining singles from the first one.

The cards I have removed are:

4 DeJesus  8 Kemp  24 Kingman  39 LeFlore  47 Royster  50 Blue  58 McBride 
77 Blair  78 Campaneris  79 Cedeno  109 Bonds  112 Foster  119 Tiant 
121 Blue HFC  122 Bonds HFC  124 Foster HFC  126 Kingman HFC
(HFC = HoF Candidate)

The rest of the 126 card set are available.  Checklist is here.

So if you're in the market for singles from this set, hit me up.  I'll trade any amount for just about anything.  

The other two intact sets are also available as well - sale or trade.  And the box from the other one, with the Explorers magnet. 

New Numerous Notes

Another "notes" post to update you about miscellaneous things I've been doing.  Ideally, this would come in between real posts about deep subjects involving cards or sports, but except for mocking the current downturn in the (greatly inflated) card market, which really only involves high dollar graded cards anyway, I've really not had much to post about.  

Aw, your Gem Mint 10 Ohtani rookie isn't still worth
6000% of what it lists as a raw card any more?

I did get some mailings from Night Owl and a few others, but a while back a lot of people said that "Look what I got" posts were boring.  One Trading Bases member just destroyed my 2021 A&G wants with a huge stack of base, inserts, and short prints.  He was celebrating a cancer-free health report from his doctor apparently.  I still have minis and other things to trade from A&G.  

I'm also awaiting the other four parts of a five seller order from SportLots.  It was shipped yesterday.  I originally went on there to knock out the last few cards from some of the most recent sets that I had narrowed down at the National, but ended up with more from several years ago that really didn't clear many set entries from my lists at all.

Not my dog or house

Aside from all that, I'm immersed in my YouTube addiction (music, cars, dogs, cards, etc.) and the NFL season.  I thought I did OK in my fantasy draft - got all the guys I wanted.  I stayed away from anyone I had last year, with a couple exceptions.  Now those are the only guys that are scoring high.  Oh well, it's early yet.  And of course, my Washington team had to go to Plan B after the first game.  I like Taylor Heinicke and I hope he can stay healthy and keep us as competitive as he showed against the champs last year.

On the brighter side, the old Buick is back in action.  I cleaned out the filter at the carburetor and it started and ran much better.  Took it to a show at an airport museum about half an hour away last week.  Have another one Sunday here in town.  Last week's show had most of the parking lot filled with classic cars, plus the museum's collection of vintage (mostly Fairchild - the building was the old Fairchild assembly plant) aircraft.  Also around were fire trucks of varying ages, military vehicles, and a few motorcycles.  For $150 donation, you could take a 30 minute ride in one of a few different vintage airplanes.  No thanks, but it was nice to see aircraft and things again.

My latest musical obsession.  Nightwish performing Ghost Love Score at Wacken Open Air 2013.  Floor Jansen is one of the most incredible vocalists on the planet.  Around the 8:00 mark, she takes it to another level.  Gives me chills every time.

 

Not Found On Google

You may be having trouble looking at my want list site.  The link over there to the right is probably not giving you my pages.  (Bleep bloop it in the comments as to what you're seeing, I'm curious.)

Google has shut down their "old" style websites in favor of a new version that seems to be limited to six themes or templates, all of which are excessively generic and not geared to the kind of pages that work well for plain text lists.  

I tried to convert my site into the new format, but found it incredibly labor intensive, since the conversion ruins all the formatting (which I am very OCD about), distorts all the fonts and combines certain text with adjacent paragraphs that must be manually separated.  After trying to make my Home page into something feasible, I got too frustrated and gave up.  

It is now impossible to embed pictures into your text.  On these pages, images are either the full width of the text page, or in their own isolated column, which pushes the text into a narrower field.  The football image above was meant to be that way, but the smaller one belongs much farther down the page.  Another image did stick about halfway down from there, so I have no idea.

This screenshot also shows the editing view and three images that were previously embedded and now wander aimlessly at the beginning of the section.  Conversion divides the text into sections when the spacing changes.  This would be useful if you did one for each set, but that would probably prove way too time consuming and cumbersome.

I had experimented with putting my lists on additional pages here on the blog, and so I spent several hours updating and pasting in the rest of my Baseball page last night.  You may have already seen the Baseball Wants tab above this blog page.  Unfortunately, even though the editing is similar to the old Google site, the page width is smaller and not indicated very well on the editor, so I kept having to go back and tweak a lot of listings for spacing and wrapping.  And then I had to go through and manually color each set heading and the text so it is easier to read against the black background.  In places where I used small type for descriptive details, etc., it shows here as another couple sizes smaller.  I changed a lot of it to regular size, but didn't get it all, so I'll just leave it for now. 

It'll do.  Once I get the other pages up, the level of work will decrease dramatically.  I don't think adding and subtracting things should be too bad.  Though I kept feeling like each time I saved and previewed the page, things would change.  I suppose I shouldn't be so OCD about how it all looks, but I like to keep it neat and readable.

So for now, this is what I'm going with.  I also put some baseball sets into my Collection on the Trading Card Database.  Now that you can add a whole set at once, and then go in and click out what you're missing right into your want list, it's not such a tedious process.  But if I'm at a show or shop, I want to see all my want lists at once so I can scroll up and down, and the Database can't do that (at least not that I've seen).

If you guys know of another simple free website service that works well, let me know below.  I saved all my pages before they got locked down, so I have all my data.

And thanks a lot, Google....

Cardboard OCD Special - Split It, Don't Rip It

I was fortunate enough to pull a Rip Card out of one box of 2021 Allen & Ginter last week.  I could never leave the inner contents unrevealed, but how to preserve the outer card and still get to the mini inside?  Watch and learn!

I've never believed in destroying cards if they are in presentable shape, even if they're 1990 Donruss or something.  And with Rip cards, I figure there has to be a way to get the mini out of the middle without tearing up the outside card.  These are thick enough that you should be able to slice the edges and keep the outer card whole, right?  But how to keep the blade aligned?

So I found that an old Donruss puzzle piece is about half the thickness of a Rip card.  This should make a good base.

• Lay both the Rip card and the puzzle card on a flat surface. 
• Place a razor blade on the puzzle card so the end only protrudes about half an inch or less.  You don't want to cut any farther into the Rip card than you have to.  
• Push the Rip card up against the puzzle card.  
• Hold down the blade firmly in one hand while guiding the Rip card along the edge - sorta like running a board through a table saw. 

• Repeat for the two short edges

This should split the Rip card enough to get to the mini inside.

 And your Rip card is still in presentable condition!

I got a metal Manny Machado in mine.  (Say that 3x fast).  There are apparently only three of each metal mini.  It's the Mini Exclusives Extended Metal #386. 

Here's a better look at the finish on the metal. 

Backs are white.

Anyway, hope that helps you preserve your Rip cards and not slice up your fingers!