Danielle Edlund
Doug Kale
Keith Hower
The Hammer
dinkfod
Brian Fleischer
danhitt
Andy Broome
dsliepka
escaladefan
Tim Trout
chrisoldsFiled under: Beckett.com
Brandon, our Marketing Coordinator at Beckett, sent me this article. I thought it would be good for a laugh. Enjoy! (Warning: there’s bad languange, so read at your own risk.)
Here’s a cover you probably won’t see on Beckett Monthly. However, you will see it in Beckett Sports Card Monthly, on the back inside page – which will be in card shops and/or in your mailbox in two weeks.
Blog readers get the Behind the Scenes look, again. (Click on image for larger view.)
“We wanted to poke a little fun at ourselves and the industry that we love,” says Tracy Hackler, associate editor, who says the final-page spoof is for back readers especially.
The May issue is in the works right now. If you have any suggestions for cover lines or photos for the next “Not Next Month’s Cover,” let’s hear from you.
If it’s your birthday today, how many actual February 29th birthdays have you enjoyed? On what day do you celebrate your birthday the other three years of the cycle?
Filed under: Beckett Football, NFL, Sports Cards | Tags: Dogs, football, Michael Vick, NFL
Not trying to rekindle the whole Michael Vick thing again, but an animal shelter I support called “Best Friends Animal Society” sent me an article yesterday regarding what has been happening to the dogs involved. I figure some people may be interested in reading more about that here.
Filed under: Beckett Media | Tags: basketball cards, Beckett Media, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers
Cat, who designs our basketball magazine just sent me this first rendition of the cover of the next Beckett Basketball.
Note, as per the cover line in top right corner, that the next (April) issue of Beckett Basketball (an all following issues) will be nearly 200 pages and contain all of the price listings formerly found in Basketball PLUS.
Filed under: Beckett HQ | Tags: Beckett, Beckett Grading, Cow Palace, grading, Philadelphia, San Francisco
This blog is called Beckett Behind the Scenes: The Inside Scoop on Collecting, Beckett and Sports.
One of the inside scoops about Beckett is our travel. Readers should know that Beckett is out in the trenches not only at sports card shows, but at all types of niche shows.
Our VP of Sales just returned from NYC and the Toy Fair show. Our gaming editor took a red-eye last night from San Fran where he was at the Gaming Developers Show. On Sunday, a few of us are headed to Austin for a conference on niche magazines.
We have a BGS crew at the San Francisco Cow Palace right now grading cards and taking submissions. In six days they will board a flight to Philadelphia, and do it for the East Coasters.
And that’s just this week.
We head out to learn for and to serve our customers. It’s no fun sitting in the center seat, but you can’t make an operation like this work right if you never leave your desk.
– Pepper Hastings
Filed under: NFL | Tags: New England Patriots, Tom Brady, Super Bowl XLII
. . . from yesterday’s mail.
Filed under: Beckett.com | Tags: Beckett Media, Game Developers Conference, GDC, San Francisco
Just last night, about 11:30 p.m. in fact, I returned from the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
This is the place where all of the creative minds in the gaming business come to meet and show off their talents. There was so much to see and do that it would take 100 Web pages to cover it all.
Here are some highlights that seemed particularly interesting to me.
1. NeuroSky- Software that will actually utilize your brain waves to control a character in a video game. This had to be the most incredible product at the show. The crowd around this booth from start to finish was at least four to five people deep every minute of the day. To actually use your brain to move something in a game was totally futuristic. Maybe this company will come up with a Star Trek-type transporter next… who knows.
2. Nintendo Wii Fit- There are over 50 games built into this one game cartridge that will keep you in shape. The Wii Fit game also comes with a platform sensor that you stand on to do all sorts of exercises. This game comes out in May 2008. It will probably be “the” game for 2008 Christmas.
3. Novint Falcon controller- This controller is a joystick with Force Feedback. If your character in a game bumps into a wall you would actually feel the bounce off the wall in your hand as your move the controller. Another way is if you’re shooting a gun in a game, you would feel the pressure of the gun as it fires a bullet sending your hand backwards from the force. Wild stuff!
There was a ton a great stuff, but I’m going to save the rest of it for the next issue of Beckett Massive Online Gamer magazine.
– Doug Kale
I never knew there was a Guinness World Record for the most baseball cards collected by an individual. Apparently, there is. The record is 540,000 by a twentysomething Nevada man, according to this report.
I figure we’ve got guys on the Beckett message boards who rival or pass this guy. But you have to admit, this man has admirable collecting spirit and a love for baseball cards, something we all could use a big dose of periodically. He truly collects for the joy of collecting.
I could not find any mention of this record on the Guinness World Record web site.
However, I did learn that the oldest message in a bottle (shown above) spent 92 years 229 days at sea. It was released at 60º 50′N 00º 38′W in 1914 and recovered by a Scottish fisherman at 60º 50′N 00º 37′W in 2006.
According to my calculations, the bottle ended up about one mile from where it started. What kind of a lame record is that?
How many cards do you own?
– Pepper Hastings
Filed under: Beckett.com
I’m not one to brag, but in this case I’m kind of obligated. It’s no big deal, but I drank after-game capri-suns, powerade, gatorade, and generic sports drink (some parents were cheap), with the one and only…
Here are a few hints:
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Top Row
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Next to the chubby kid with a buzz cut
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His mascot is smoother than Kenny G.
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Not Serena, not Robin, not Tennessee
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The chubby kid would prefer to be called husky (this is not a hint).
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The chubby kid is me (this is also not a hint).
Filed under: Beckett HQ, Beckett.com, MLB, Sports Cards | Tags: 1984 Fleer Roger Clemens
People here at Beckett HQ are dipping in and out of the theater room this morning during the Roger Clemens congressional hearings. Seems that the panel is split along party lines, and that Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on this issue, either.
What do you think about all of this? I mean really, did you ever think back in 1995, when you were buying up 1984 Fleers, that you’d be watching Roger Clemens defend himself before the federal government?
And doesn’t that baseball card look really old now?
Filed under: Beckett.com | Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War collectibles, presidential autographs, presidential election
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and his signature still brings big money in auctions. I mean BIG money, like six figures for his autograph on speeches, pardons, military appointments, etc.
This cut signature which was affixed to a photo sold in a Heritage Auction Galleries 2006 event for about $4,500, and is on the low end of Lincoln autographs.
In honor of Honest Abe, Beckett Friends of Military History (BFOMH), a loose-knit organization of people who spend too much time watching PBS and reading dusty books, bring you a refresher course from seventh grade — the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on the battlefield Nov. 19, 1863.
Reading from his own handwriting and in a mere 272 words, Lincoln summarized the significance and the potential consequences of the ongoing Civil War.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
