Give a Hoot #SuperTraders!

So, today I was just about to post about an envelope I received from Canada's best blog about cards from the dollar store. Then, I saw that Night Owl did exactly that. As a result, I felt compelled to change up and see what other envelope I had available to blog about.

In a twist of irony only Canadian Alanis Morissette could find ironic, the only other cards I received recently came from...Night Owl. 

Isn't that ironic, don't you think? 

Recognizing that everyone is probably tired of hearing about how not ironic Alanis's lyrics really were and also recognizing that I need some music to pick myself up, let's go with songs and stories from and relating to the band that Rolling Stone called the "Best New Band of 1985." Of course, it's The Hooters.

1. "Who the F*ck are The Hooters?"

For those of you who don't know, the Hooters were/are a Philadelphia band who achieved some mainstream success in the 1980s. Notably, the Hooters opened the U.S. side of the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia in 1985. 

Main Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof famously responded to being required to put The Hooters on the bill by asking, "Who the f*ck are The Hooters?" At that point, Geldof could be forgiven for not knowing, seeing as their first major album did not come out until 1985.

Guess what? I've got a card for that.

Chris Demaria was drafted by the Pirates in the 17th round of the 2002 draft. The Kansas City Royals then picked Demaria up in the minor league portion of the Rule V draft in 2004, kept him for a year, and shipped him to the Milwaukee Brewers for the 2006 season. Weirdly, I have this card with Demaria in both this Royals uniform and in a painted-on Brewers uniform. I don't think I've seen that variation identified online, but it's not like anyone notices or cares other than Brewers and Royals collectors.

I don't think even Demaria noticed.

2. The Who "Behind Blue Eyes" 

In 1982, The Who went on the first of their ten farewell tours -- the current one is the tenth and possibly final one. The Hooters were the local band chosen to open for one of the farewell shows at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on September 25, 1982. 

To go with this?

I bet Zack Greinke thinks he knows what it's like to be the bad man, behind blue eyes.

3.  Cyndi Lauper: "Time After Time"

Speaking of "and I blame you," one of the co-founders of The Hooters was Rob Hyman. Rob was brought in by Cyndi Lauper's producer, Rick Chertoff, to help write "one more song" for Lauper's debut album She's So Unusual. According to Wikipedia, Hyman and Lauper sat at a piano and started working on it by drawing on their own particular relationship issues. Hyman is the male backup singer on the song.

It ended up being one of the most critically acclaimed songs in Lauper's entire catalog and regularly rates in those "Greatest Love Songs" or "Best Ballads of All-Time" countdowns that VH1 used to issue with a vengeance to fill weekend time.

I have to admit -- I've never really liked this song. I don't know if it is Lauper, the syrupy ballad not appealing to the then 11-year-old me, or what. Well, it can't be that 11-year-old thing, though, because I still don't like it.

I also still have problems with Bud Selig. In addition to my much discussed antipathy toward the club's player recruitment policies in the early 1990s, Selig made himself a laughing stock by declaring the 2002 All-Star Game -- held at Miller Park in Milwaukee -- to be a 7-7 tie when the teams ran out of pitchers after 11 innings. 

Selig put the All-Star Game in Milwaukee as an ego-feeding piece, aggrandizing the openly rapacious sales tax imposed on a five-county area (including the county in which I grew up) in order to buy Milwaukee a new stadium to increase his franchise's value. After that game, the ridiculous "solution" of giving the winning league home-field advantage came into effect. As if that made a difference. 

And yet, there is now a "Bud Selig Experience" in Miller Park to pay tribute to the man. I get that he brought baseball back to Milwaukee. It's just that he spent so much time making sure that baseball in Milwaukee would always feature a terrible team that pisses me off.

4. The Hooters "All You Zombies"

This song is almost as much about biblical stories as it is anything else. It does rip on people being "zombies" and not paying attention to those who are trying to lead them away from bad things -- like Noah and Moses. This song may name check Moses more than any other song in history.

Apropos of nothing, here are four cards from the 1980s and 1990s. Let's talk about Don August. From everything I've heard and seen, he is a pretty decent dude who still participates in Brewer fantasy camps, as he mentioned on April 24 on Twitter. He was traded from the Houston Astros to the Brewers with Mark Knudsen in exchange for the skeletal remnants of Danny Darwin's career in August of 1986. August is a trivia answer as well -- he was the winning pitcher in the first game played at SkyDome (Rogers Centre) in Toronto back on June 5, 1989.

5. The Hooters "And We Danced"

The song I most remember from The Hooters is "And We Danced." It only reached number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, though it hit #3 on the Mainstream Rock chart. This article compares the song unfavorably to one of the universally most disliked pop songs of all time, "We Built This City." The article concludes that the video -- watch it yourself! -- "may be pop culture's worst musical moment ever."

Ever? Really? I mean, it's pretty cheesy, what with the breaking into a drive-in theater being featured in a mid-1980s song as if drive-ins still existed at that point. They did, but they were dying fast, of course.

UK music magazine NME calls the following song only the fifth-worst video ever. It's a song called "Call on Me" by Eric Prydz. 

I'm legitimately scared for my life after watching that video. Is it the simulated sex with a towel? Women working out in thongs? The legwarmers? The sketchy Italian guy just hanging out in the class with a dirtbag smile? The fact that one of the women actually walks up to sketchy dude and is interested?

Yes. Yes it is.

To go with this, well, nothing Night Owl sent deserves this. 

But, let's go with some Finest and a little bit of Oddball. Something needs to redeem this post. 

Only an oddball can. It's certainly not The Hooters.

Night Owl, thank you once again for sending these cards my way -- they are greatly appreciated...far more than The Hooters ever could be. 

A Cardboard Clubhouse Christmas/Birthday?

I have a Christmastime birthday. As anyone else who is similarly situated can tell you, those of us born at the "most wonderful time of the year" often feel a little short-changed when it comes to our birthdays. One of my law partners was born on Christmas Day and turned 50 this year; he said he could count on one hand the number of birthday-only parties he had had in his life. 

I'd have to agree with that from my perspective. My birthday is tomorrow. Growing up, I had a ninth birthday party in third grade when we went bowling. After that, I had a thirtieth birthday party thrown by the woman I was dating at that time and a fortieth birthday party thrown by my wife.

I'm not crying about it, to be fair. As much as I dislike this old saw, well, it is what it is. 

Note: I am not a Liverpool fan. In fact, I really wish that Manchester United had Jurgen Klopp instead of the Scousers. If you've ever met a Scouser, you'd know -- their version of "English" might as well be Dutch -- it's damn near incomprehensible. I went to a match at White Hart Lane (Tottenham Hotspur, if you're not up on your English stadiums) against Liverpool, and the Londoners around me were taking the piss out of the Liverpudlians -- saying things like, "you've got no education" and "you shag your mum" and other such ditties. But Klopp singing happy birthday is still class.

Anyway, someone else in the card blogging world who can understand this conundrum is Adam from Cardboard Clubhouse. Adam's birthday is 8 days before mine, and he posted his birthday meal as a post last week to celebrate. My wife and I are celebrating my birthday tonight with dinner at one of our favorite hangouts in Dunwoody, so maybe I'll have dinner posted later tonight as well. 

Enough birthday talk. Adam sent me a nice handful of cards that I'd like to highlight today:



Odd -- the Stadium Club insert photo would not have been out of place on the logoless Donruss. And, if you don't start humming crappy Cyndi Lauper songs when you see that insert, well, you're clearly not a child of the 1980s.

God I hated that song. Kind of like how some trades were easily hated for me as a Brewers fan both at the time the trade was made and in retrospect.  Such as trading Dante Bichette for Kevin Reimer:

Or Nelson Cruz AND Carlos Lee for Francisco Cordero, Kevin Mench, and Laynce Nix and a minor leaguer.  Basically, trading two twenty-dollar bills for a five and four quarters.

Happier times were enjoyed by John Jaha. In 1996, he hit 34 home runs for the Brewers. At the time, that was tied with Larry Hisle as being the sixth-most homers in a season for the club. Since that time, the Brewers have added nine seasons in which players hit more than 34 home runs -- no surprise there, to be fair.  Still, injuries and weight problems led to Jaha's downfall as a major leaguer.

One of the players to add a couple of those seasons with more than 34 homers was Richie Sexson. He never really got attached to Milwaukee, and, as a result, the Brewers didn't get too attached to him and traded him away too.

Let's close with three cards from 2015. One of these guys was traded away to bring tons of quality to the minor league system, one guy is likely to be traded in the next 8 months in a similar-type trade, and the final one is likely to be one of the building blocks going forward.

Being all up to date means needing to get a song here that is all up to date.  Here's a recent favorite of mine:

Many thanks to Adam for all of these great cards -- the return envelope is being put together nearly contemporaneously herewith, to put it in lawyer-speak.