Night Owl Cards

I don't expect this post to make sense to anybody. But then I've gone through life with half the people in town looking at me like I just dropped in from another dimension, so this won't be anything different. I went to an antique show yesterday and found some baseball cards. They were vintage cards. And they were affordable. And I didn't buy a thing. Come with me while I try to figure out why I would do such a thing. This antique show is the show I went to last year . As I mentioned last year, it has replaced the card show that was in the same place that I attended every year. Last year I went to the antique show in hopes of spotting cards, and I did, and I was happy with what I bought. So I returned to the show yesterday with that knowledge. When I arrived it was quite busy and filled with river people. Older retired types with bronzed skin, white hair and Hawaiian shirts. As usual, they're not in a hurry to move or be aware that there are other people t...

I do not drink as much beer as I once did. I would never call myself a beer connoisseur -- talk of making your own beer, the breweries you've discovered, or other esoteric ruminations about hops and barley bore me completely -- but I enjoy a good brew. Today, though, I can mostly confine beer-imbibing to one of two categories. 1) It's summertime and I'm off. 2) I'm exhausted and the world has decided "night owl is the enemy." Today it's in the high 70s, rather humid, and I've got a busy workload tonight. None of this really falls into category 1) or 2), but for some reason -- perhaps the nine zillion beer commercials that I've watched during all of my baseball viewing has finally gotten to me -- I can't stop thinking about a beverage. In short, I need a beer. Here's the problem. There's no beer in the house. And with the budget cutbacks continuing for another week, I can't be buying any without there being ... um ... r...

I think it's pretty well-known that the Yankees have a facial hair policy. No beards. No girly hair. But mustaches are OK (and, so, apparently are Nick Swisher mohawks. That's right, no beards, but that monstrosity is fine.  I'll never decipher the Yankees). I think it's also well-known that the Reds had a facial hair policy for three decades, beginning in the late 1960s. It was some knee jerk reaction to hippies running wild and infiltrating our baseball teams. And it's probably known that when players leave the Yankees, or left the Reds back in the day, some of them grow facial hair because they had been deprived of this manly pursuit for so many years. I am going to focus on the Reds, because there's already way too much attention paid to the Yankees, and because I first noticed this phenomenon with the Big Red Machine teams of the mid-1970s. When players left the BRM, many of them suddenly appeared on their new teams sprouting mustaches and othe...