Proud Member Of

CAL RIPKEN JR. has been a part of my life since I was two years old. One of my earliest memories is the Baltimore Orioles winning the World Series in 1983... My father would park me in front of the televisoin and I'd watch Ripken dive for line drives and knock dingers over the fence... I can remember chopping away at macaroni and cheese boxes to collect his cards, even those with the jagged edges. Sometimes I'd rip a RYNE SANDBERG in half but I didn't care, because I had the Ripken... Then I would hug it, and place it under my pillow at night... This is long before I knew what gay was... This was before saying "knocking dingers" meant you were beating off a weenie... This was long before I ever had sex with RYNE SANDBERG.

20 years later I'm still that little boy in front of the television, only now my boobs go all the way around to the back and my chest hairs poke out of my wet flab like my ribcage is The Dead Marshes... The baseball strike really hurt my love of the sport, along with baseball card packs going from a dollar twenty-five to twelve bucks a pack because of holofoil die-cut autographed real bat fragment insert cards... I just wanted to get a Bo Jackson card because I thought he was a cool two-sport star... not because I wanted to see him in his jock. Nolan Ryan throwing a football... people with surfboards... Beckett magazine overloaded with "surfs up man!" homemade cards in the dying days before Paint Shop Pro.

I wanted to think back on those fond days spent eating ten or twelve boxes of macaroni and cheese a day to get the cards... And more than just memories the Blue Box Blues, because that would make me BB King... But there is so much to remember, so many players, everyone from FRANK THOMAS to KELLY GRUBER, from DAVE MAGADAN to the vaunted CAL RIPKEN JR... I found my MARK MCGWIRE USA Team card... I found my WALLY JOYNER rookie card which I totally held onto because he stole like eleven bases one year which means he had SPEED and therefore should be in the HALL OF FAME... Then I found something I'd long forgotten... the JOY OF ERROR CARDS!

Webster's Dictionary defines an error as "something produced by mistake." This can include discoloration, a poor spelling of a player's name, or mismatching of a photograph... I know about error cards because I collected every one I could find... I know what Webster's Dictionary defines "error" as because I had a copy of it here under a big pile of Neil Gaiman comics... When will somebody pick up the license to produce a big-time Hollywood "SANDMAN" flick??? starring JOHNNY DEPP??? I would see that flick twenty times on the first day... I would love it... Both because of my love for things that all geeks love and because I love every movie... I even loved LOVE ACTUALLY... did you see that???? It was like waking up with your wife's naked yeast infection right in your face and not being awake enough to keep brown and serve rolls from forming in your mouth... HUGH GRANT should have been replaced by MAN IN SUIT!!!!!!!

more boring childhood memories go here

remember to replace "wife" with "Legolas"

In 1990, error cards were all the rage in trading cards... It got to the point most collectors figured out many of the "errors" were not really errors, but planned mistakes by card manufacturers designed to drive sales... The first error card to take the world by storm was in the inagural set of Upper Deck cards in 1989, the famous Dale Murphy "rerverse negative" ... It was just a messed up picture of Dale Murphy (the image was flipped, the name on his jersey was backwards) but it succeeded in selling pack after pack... it tricked us all into putting a cardboard picture of Dale Murphy into hard plastic... the only time that had happened before was when his mom framed his high school graduation photo... backwards...

THANKS MOM.

UPPER DECK turned out to be a real BUNCH OF LIARS, because they duplicated the purposeful error on other cards in the same set. DONRUSS BRAND BASEBALL CARDS tried the trick a year later with Juan Gonzalez with similar results... But the cream of the error card crop came in 89 as well, and I knew about it first... because it happened to an Oriole... and it happened to a Ripken...

BILL RIPKEN, second baseman and little brother of superstar shortstop CAL, was posing for his 1989 FLEER BRAND BASEBALL CARD, never noticing that his teammates had scrawled something obscene on the end of his bat as a joke... He said he didn't notice until it was too late... Too late because it had passed Ripken, the photographer, and the card company... and it had shined a light into the heart of every young boy or girl who grew up under strict lock and key but dreamed of one day suggesting that they could have sex with your nose and eyes.

YES, the card says what you think it says... there is really no mistaking it... BILL RIPKEN'S bat says "FUCK FACE" ... and it was TOTALLY AWESOME. The poop (or SHIT as we were now free to say) hit the fan... Collectors went APESHIT for the FUCKING card that bore the curse, charging dozens and dozens of dollars for a BILL RIPKEN card never meant to leave the gated community of "common." FLEER reacted like they had just entered a dark room and flipped on the light only to find that they were now surrounded by JANET JACKSONS TITTY... The first attempt to cover the error was a blotch of white-out... that didn't work, so they tried to cover the TOTALLY AWESOME WORDS with a black box... this was even less successful....

The price for the card variations continued to rise... MARVEL COMICS suggested that FLEER market the BILL RIPKEN FUCK FACE card in it's own factory sealed plastic bag... Dealers found it difficult to display the polybagged edition because crumpled plastic stuffed into another piece of hard plastic made the card look "near mint" instead of "mint"... for you non-collectors "near mint" refers to your spacial relationship to the cash register at a restaurant... Many people opted to keep putting the card into bigger and bigger pieces of plastic until "FUCK FACE" had become illegible and BILL RIPKEN'S hapless happy expression could barely be seen, like Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin under the evil influence of the Barrow-wights... Or like Jordan, Rodman, Kukoc, and Pippin under the evil slam dunks of Shawn Kemp.

Variation four was a popular card because it proved that censorship in America was alive and well, and that the bone-rattling coolness of seeing the word "FUCK" on a baseball card was too much to defeat...

It lacked the subtlety of it's predecessors but nonetheless filled card show after card show with more "FUCKS" than the house of the guy who made EARL WEAVER'S hats when Earl would get pissed off... More "FUCKS" than me surrounded by MANON RHEAUME CLASSIC rookie cards in the middle of the night... More "FUCKS" than a room full of BILL RIPKEN FUCK FACE error cards... wait, no... ARAGORN? Yes.

Like any wonderful trend it was ruined for everybody when second-run card companies decided to toss curse words onto their product to sell packs... Even BAZOOKA JOE COMICS...

The trend continues to this day... Even the first series of cards produced for THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is evident of this...

And most recently the world of fat lonely boys and excited teenage girls was rocked when DIRECTOR AND PERSONAL HERO SAINT PETER JACKSON commissioned autographed insert cards to be placed in random packs of LORD OF THE RINGS trading cards... Many of the cards were pleasant, like IAN and VIGGO... hell, ORLANDO even drew squigglies and hearts around his name... but SCOTTISH HOBBIT BILLY BOYD, the actor who plays SCOTTISH HOBBIT PIPPIN in LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (or LOTR:FOTR as we abbreviate it, because it's hilarious to call it "lotter fotter") broke the cycle... inspired by BILL RIPKEN, the SCOTTISH HOBBIT LOTTER FOTTER took liberties with his signature and broke the hearts of chaste Christian girls looking for God in Good Old JRRRRRRRRRRR TOLKIEN'S EPIC TRILOGY...

BILL RIPKEN was never a great player... He never played in the WORLD SERIES, never PERFORMED IN AN ALL-STAR GAME, and never RAPED A GIRL IN HER BUTT, but what he DID do was bless our nation with the freedoms for which our forefathers fought and died so valiantly to invent: the freedom to write FUCK on anything we want. And what does this mean to me personally?

BILL RIPKEN was the younger brother of CAL RIPKEN JR., my favorite baseball player who played in over 80,000 consecutive games before his untimely demise via a DEREK JETER QUEER LINE DRIVE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY in 2000.

To CELEBRATE I will cook up six boxes of KRAFT MACARONI AND CHEESE and watch six showings of LOTTER FOTTER... and then I will write FUCK FACE all over my COMMEMORATIVE SMEAGOL STATUE.

All for you, IRON MAN. All for you.

LOOK ARTICLE WRITTEN BY B

P-BOI TALK BACK!!!!