Career runner up finally gets a win!

I haven't had a good history in any sort of contest whether it be popularity, athletic or academic. I've never been motivated to enter many contests until I started blogging and it seemed like every few days somebody was having some sort of giveaway or contest. I never seemed to do well in any of those contests, so I've tried to keep my expectations down when entering them now.

Beardy from the Mojo Beard was holding a National Convention contest. He was asking what his purchases were at the national and I guessed Nick Markakis 2003 Bowman Chrome.

I guess my extra motivation was seeing what he had up for contest winnings. When I saw the names: Bradford, Favre and Griffin I knew I had to pull out some extra brain power and try to win this thing.


Turns out I correctly guess one of his purchases so I got the three cards I wanted. I don't have any experience with this product, so these were the first cards that I've seen of Donruss Elite. They're pretty nice.



This will be my first of hopefully many Blake Griffin cards. I have a Panini sticker that Brian from Play at the Plate sent over, but this is my first "real" card of the former OU and current LA Clippers guard. He's from Edmond, Oklahoma.

Bradford is also a local guy who played for OU and is now doing okay as a rookie with the St. Louis Rams. Like to watch this guy. Hopefully he'll do well for the Rams. I noticed the other day that the Rams traded for former OU wideout Mark Clayton. I liked to watch Mark at OU, but haven't seen many Ravens games so I'm hoping to catch both of them playing for St. Louis soon.

I'm not big on Favre anymore because of his off field nonsense, but he's still a pretty good QB and Peterson needs a competent quarterback to hand him the ball. Notice how everything somehow revolves around the University of Oklahoma?



The three other guys in the prize lot were a mystery to me. I picked Javid Best as my backup running back in B A Benny's fantasy draft mainly because of this card. I couldn't remember anybody else and the clock was ticking. Hopefully he'll do well. I can't imagine the Lions doing anything ever, but who knows?


Thanks for having the contest and thanks for the cool cards.

Ho Ho Holiday Contest winnings!

I just got my winnings in the mail today from Beardy, who hosted the cool
Ho Ho Holiday Contest last month. My entry was good for Honorable Mention, which is about where I hoped to finish. Their were a lot of great entries, and I'm glad to at least have not embarrassed myself.

I had sort of forgotten to check out the post that had the list of winnings for the top three to choose from. The funny thing is, the cards that were left over that I wanted where the exact ones that Beardy sent over to me. My good luck continues!!

I know everybody wants to see the bounty so here goes...


First up is a Luis Cruz auto card. When I looked at the back I was wondering why it was serial numbered. I didn't even notice the auto at first. It's a sticker auto, but blends in really well with the design of the card.



It's a 2008 Donruss Threads card. When I look at the card the "Houston" nameplate at the top always makes me think it's one of those anti-theft sticky things that they hide in CD's. I guess they hide them in a lot of different things, but not at the top of baseball cards. It makes me do a double take, but I guess I should get over it.

I'm assuming he's wearing a Greeneville jersey which is an affiliate of the Red Sox, so I wonder why it's got a Houston label on the top. It's a pretty cool looking card simply for the crop of the player and especially his facial expression.


The next up is a Fred Lewis bat relic from this years Allen and Ginter set.


Still love this set. I have a Rocco Balldelli bat relic as well, getting anything Ginter related is cool to me.


Next up is a Matt Jones rookie refractor card.

I know immediately who this is. He is a former University of Arkansas quarterback who played my team the University of Oklahoma in the 2002 Cotton Bowl. We won. One of the last meaningful bowl games we won. I'm not sure if any of the bowl games including the national championship game is really that meaningful. Maybe a playoff type postseason might be the best,but for now this is what we got to live with.


He looks a little creepy on the back.

This card is also serial numbered. Hmmm. That's pretty cool. I think this guy might have gotten arrested for cocaine possession at some point. I don't remember though.
I didn't keep up with the Razorbacks much at that point, but I do remember that Matt Jones was the fast mobile quarterback and the other guy was more of the pocket passer. If memory serves me correct, I think they would have little run/option type packages for Jones to run on his own. They didn't call it the Wildcat then, but I think this might be a precursor to that idea. The head coach of that team Houston Nutt is the guy usually credited to coming up with the Wildcat, right?


Next up is the pants relic card from the movie "Outlander". I haven't seen this movie. According to IMDB it is
a movie about vikings.


Anyway, it's some piece of pants from John Hurt. A pretty cool actor. His pants are a little leathery. (Yeah, I felt them up). This is my first time to own a piece of Hollywood memorabilia and it reminds me a little of Jon Voight's pencil from that Seinfeld episode. I hate to keep bringing up that show, but it's one of my all time faves. The pencil in the episode is found in "John Voight's" car and has teeth marks on it, and they set out to get Jon Voight to bite the pencil to see if the teeth marks match up. Those cut ups!


Next up is a 2008 Allen and Ginter pants relic from Bobby Crosby.


I love Ginter from all seasons. The 2008 Ginter season seems a little cold to me with all the white space around the subject, but still a nice set. Especially with the minis and relics it removes a lot of that white space and makes the figure more of a main design element than just a little figure on a white card.



... and lastly we have a Ryan Ludwick refractor numbered to 399.


It's nice. It has a trivia question on the back and I didn't even have to rub it with a coin.

Cool stack of cards. I'm really glad to have gotten them. Thanks again Beardy for the contest and the cards.

Ho Ho Holiday Contest entry

Beardy has the entries for the Ho Ho Holiday Contest posted up and I wanted to try and explain my rationale for why I chose the card I entered for Beardy's Ho Ho Contest.

It wasn't hard for me to use Festivus as inspiration for the contest. I really like the show Seinfeld and I've always liked that episode. I also like that somebody really did invent their own holiday especially one that was against onslaught of consumerism in the celebration of our holidays.

When I thought of "Festivus" as a theme, I immediately plopped in the DVD to watch the episode. Something about the word "Festivus" made me think of colored circles with letters inside them. Sort of like the 2008 Topps baseball and football cards.
I don't really like that design much, so I decided on the Heritage design for a few reasons.

One of the reasons was the episode itself.



When Frank Costanza and Kramer walk into Monk's Diner to confront George about the rebirth of Festivus, Frank tells George it's his "heritage" to celebrate Festivus.


Also in the coffee shop scene George and Jerry are talking about Jerry's new girlfriend who they dub "two face" because she looks completely different depending on the lighting.


Like the Batman villan Harvey Dent aka: "Two Face".



Jerry mentions that she's like a baseball card where the player moves when you turn it a certain way.



George responds: "I see, tilt it one way and the player is on base, turn it another way and advancing the runner."



So those two reasons made me think I was on the right track to do a cool holiday card in the 1960 design.

The fact that they mentioned baseball cards in this episode made me think...


... that maybe it's another Festivus Miracle!!!


Now on with the card:

Here is the front.



I tried doing a Heritage style chrome card. I like the chromes better in real life anyway. (Who doesn't like shiny chrome!?), so I tried deasturating the background in the screen shot and adding a silver color overlay. Neither of them really made it look authentic. I tried a few other filters, but I never could get it to work out right. I did want to make the foreground characters to stand out better so I left them alone and edited the background to my liking.

I also did a slightly different version with a Frank Constanza character pointing upward as he tells Kramer about his creation of Festivus.



I ended up keeping the simpler design of the Festivus Pole instead of a "player" cutout.

Here is the back of the card.

I tried "roughing it up" a little to make it seem like the rough backs like the Heritage cards.

Here is a real Heritage back for comparison.


I'm not sure if the back looks authentic either, but I like it okay. I decided to not include any sort of Topps logo or legal stuff on the back or front. I probably should have to make it look more like a real card, but it looks fine to me.

In retrospect though, I probably should've changed the background of the card back to a light brownish color to make it look a little more like the real card.



I kept referring to my Jose Reyes chrome card as a reference.


I noticed when looking at the card I missed one important thing: I didn't put a silver border around the card. Another strike against me. I'm hoping that I'm not screwing myself by posting up my mistakes.

All in all it was a fun contest to enter. Hopefully I will at least place in the top three or get an honorable mention.

I really do like all the other entries. I had noticed that Mark's Ephemera had already posted up his entry and I was starting to feel a lot less confident in my card entry. Looking at everybody's entries makes me feel a whole lot less confident. Oh well. It was fun to make the card and it'll be fun to see who wins it.