Star Trek as Space Opera

I'm not real familiar with Robot Chicken but he (they?) make parody films on YouTube. I found this on Tild's blog. She doesn't post often but she has a great blog. I've mentioned before that I'm a big Star Trek fan and can hardly wait for the new movie. But until then, I think I'll just watch this over and over.

Thursday Night at the Movies - Jumper

Jumper is based loosely on a 1992 Steven Gould Novel of the same name. I remembered reading the book and liking it so was looking forward to the movie, which was released almost a year ago. It got pretty bad reviews so we never went to see it. My daughter brought it home from the library (she'd also liked the book) since there wasn't anything in the theater we wanted to see.I guess the movie wasn't so bad although I glad we didn't pay to see it in the theater. The plot is simple, David Rice is a Jumper, he can teleport himself and apparently anything he's touching to anywhere in the world. For years he robs banks and pretty much has a good time. That is until the Paladins catch up with him. The Paladins are a secret group that have been hunting down Jumpers down through the ages. The chief Paladin is Samuel L Jackson, basically playing his righteous Pulp Fiction character but with white hair. The real problem with the movie is that none of it makes any sense. And they make very little attempt to make it make sense. My recommendation is that if you're trapped on the sofa and this movie comes up on cable and there isn't a baseball game on, go ahead and watch it. But don't go out of your way for it.

I looked the movie up on imdb.com because I couldn't remember when the movie was released. Imdb.com has a section on the page with links that people interested in the movie might be interested in. There was one link to a hospital specializing in "Psychiatric and Chemical Dependency Treatment for Adults and Teenagers" and two suicide prevention web sites. Just what are they trying to tell me about people who like this movie?

1996 Part 4

The 1996 baseball cards that I own continued.

Leaf
For 1996, Leaf offered a 220 card set featuring full bleed photography with a glossy finish. The logo was in silver foil. The left and bottom edges have a foil finish. The backs feature a full photograph and a smaller head shot, plus last season and career stats. Leaf was another premium set started in 1991 and published by Donruss. 1996 is, by far, my least favorite year of Leaf in terms of design. There was only one subset, the Gold Leaf Rookie. I think this design is much nicer than the base card.
Leaf Bronze Press Proofs
Just as with the Donruss base set, Leaf came with parallels called Press Proofs in Bronze (2,000 sets), Silver (1,000 sets) and Gold (500 sets). The cards were not serial numbered. I acquired this Bronze card on eBay in 2004 for $3.00. I don't have any of the Silver or Gold

Leaf All-Star Game MVP Contenders
This 20-card insert set was randomly inserted in Leaf Packs. According to Beckett, you could redeem one of these for the a set of the Gold version, it you were the among the first 5,000 to send back the card before the All-Star Game. The Gold version was limited to 5,000 sets. I probably pulled this from a pack. I don't remember the redemption promotion.

Leaf Gold Stars
A 16-card set, inserted at 1:190. I got this on eBay in 2004 for $4.25. The card is designed to look like a gold ingot. It is numbered to 2,500.

Leaf Picture Perfect
This 12-card set was inserted at a ratio of 1:40. I paid $4.50 for this one on eBay in 2005. It is serial numbered to 5,000. This is one of the first cards that I know of that was made of wood. It is an attractive card but the card is warped due to the glossy finish on the back.

Leaf Total Bases
Another attractive insert card (1:72), also serial numbered to 5,000. The front has a matte finish but it has a high gloss finish on the back. The logo and card title are in gold foil. This was obtained on eBay for $3.99 in 2005.

There are 3 inserts I don't have: Leaf Hats Off (inserted at 1:72, numbered to 5,000), Leaf Statistical Standouts (inserted at 1:210, numbered to 2,500) and Leaf Thomas Greatest Hits. There were 7 cards in the Thomas Greatest Hits set, inserted at 1:210, with a print run of 5,000. An 8th card was available through a mail-in redemption.

Package from Eric

Early in January I received an 800-card box of baseball cards from the extremely generous Eric. It was full of Phillies and Astros. Wow. It's take me this long to get through them all. Since I'm a big Phillies and Astros collector, there were bound to be a bunch of cards in the box I already had but I needed about 150 cards in the box. Many of the rest, I only had one copy of so that was ok as well. And many of the duplicate Phillies cards are going on to an old friend of mine who has been toying with collecting cards for years. He's finally completed his last Master's Degree and now has some free time.

While I've been cataloging these cards I've been thinking about which cards to feature on the blog. I've decided to feature these 2004 Andy Pettitte cards. For one thing, Eric is a big Pettitte fan so I was surprised to see so many Pettittes in the box. Most of what he included, I didn't have. For another, these are all products of Fleer, which we'll probably never see again.

2004 Ultra # 222

2004 Fleer Sweet Sigs # 47

2004 Fleer Platinum # 88

2004 Fleer Patchworks # 5

Thanks Eric. And here's hoping that Andy has a big year.

2009 Topps First Look

First look by me anyway. Other bloggers have reported sightings at Target so I stopped in there this afternoon. They were selling loose 12-card packs for $1.99. I bought 5. I also bought 3 packs of Topps American Heritage. I'll post something on those later.

I'm going to feature 5 cards from the first pack I opened. First of all, I like the design right out of the pack. Last's year's design had to grow on me. 2009 has a clean design which is a clear break from the past several years. The photograph is large and the card is not cluttered with stuff. Most of the cards I pulled have decent photos. The backs are also different. In the five packs I pulled three Phillies and no Astros.

Look Mickey Mantle! Isn't this a great card? Card #7 of course.

There appears to be one insert card per pack. I got two Turkey Reds. These are pretty much identical to the Topps Turkey Red sets.
There was also one ToppsTown card per pack which counted as one of the 12 cards. 4 of the cards I got had gray backgrounds like this Pujols. The other had a gold colored background. A parallel version?
The creepy looking guy on this Topps Legends of the Game insert card is Babe Ruth. I got two of these, the other card features Therman Munson. Are they all going to be Yankees? Too small of a sample to tell at this point.
The other insert card I got was a Topps Gold Border of Zack Greinke. Numbered to 2009, of course.

And if you didn't get enough Topps Of The Class cards with David Wright last year, rest assured, they're back this year.

What do these players have in common?









You can add to this list Doug Brocail, Russ Springer, Troy Percival and Arthur Rhodes.

One thing they have in common is that they are all over 40 years old. Which means they were all born in the 1960s. They are the only active players (meaning they are on some team's 40-man roster) who born in the 1960s.

Over the years I've noted the following milestones with regret:

The retirement of the last player who was older than me (born before 10/27/51)
The retirement of the last player born in the 1950s
The debut game of the first player who was younger than my oldest son (born after 4/13/84)

I don't remember who these players were and it doesn't really matter. The nest milestone, the retirement of the last player born in the 1960s. Who will it be?

Capewood's Collection - One-Year Anniversary

Back in January I wondered if there were any blogs devoted to baseball cards. So I went to Google, typed in "baseball card blogs" and found The Baseball Card Blog. Ben Henry's blog (now since retired) had been published since January 2006. I also found Stale Gum, Chris Harris' blog which has archives going back to May 2001, but he's been doing this since 1998. Through them, I found other blogs. After reading them for a few weeks, I decided I could do this as well. Capewood's Collections was launched on February 1, 2008, with the pride of my baseball card collection, a Mike Schmidt rookie card.

At the time, I figured I'd be lucky if I could get a few of my friends and relatives to read it. Since few of them are interested in baseball cards, I wanted to have a broader appeal. I wanted to feature a number of things I was interested in such as photography, bonsai plants, old postcards, music, etc. Here's what 262 posts over the past year have amounted to:

It's been mostly baseball cards. Since I started, a lot of other people have started baseball card blogs (and I found a few more which predated me). And I found that these people were reading mine. So my audience isn't what I expected. Frankly, I didn't expect to have an audience at all. I'd read that the average blog has 1 reader. I'm way ahead of that. I'm currently getting 40-60 hits a day which is great. Doing this for the past year has been a rewarding experience. I've met some very nice people on-line and feel a part of a community of collectors.

2008 was an eventful year for me. My daughter graduated from college, we survived Hurricane Ike, I had 3 stents put in my heart. It was great being able to share my life and my baseball cards with so many. Thanks to you all.

Now on to year 2...