A beanie for me; a cap for Bloopy

Cathy recently ordered some gear from a company specialising in American sports. This included a new beanie for me so I can represent my favourite baseball club in cold weather.

Cathy's order also included a keyring Padres cap.

Which turned out to be a perfect fit for Bloopy the Blue-footed Booby. 

Bloopy arrived in our home as a result of sponsoring a blue footed booby through the Galapagos Trust - a great charity protecting wildlife on the other side of the world.

I'm a big fan of animal sponsorship. We started sponsoring animals during the pandemic when several trusts and charities needed an extra bit of support. (I wrote a post back then about the virtual menagerie we collected.) 

I don't think it would be possible to get a real blue footed booby to wear a cap, nor should we try to make them. Bloopy looks like a dude in his, though. 

The machines are listening

Earlier this month I had a long conversation with my friend Gawain. We met online as we both collect baseball cards and occasionally we have chats about the sport, collecting cards and the state of the world. During the conversation I showed Gawain the Lego minifigure that another friend, Connor gave me last year.

It's a customised printed figure wearing a retro San Diego Padres uniform. Connor designed it using a machine at a Lego Discovery Centre. Gawain and I discussed how if someone started printing these off there would probably be a decent collector's market for them. He also listened to me patiently talking some more about Lego and how it is increasingly geared towards adult collectors. 

We were chatting on the Messenger app, which is part of Meta, the same company as Facebook and WhatsApp. The next day he sent me these screen grabs for adverts that appeared on his Facebook feed.

We weren't typing messages to each other. We were talking. And the machines were listening. I get ads related to Lego on my Facebook feed all the time, which I always assumed was down to the groups I'm in. But some intelligent system recognised Gawain talking about Lego and offered him some highly specialised services in those ads - the kind of ads that would be of interest to people who are collecting Lego to invest or are thinking of printing designs on minifigures. 

My most popular blog post of 2022 was about how I realised an app I use to track going to football matches was shaping my choices through gamification. Seeing a conversation with a friend turned into marketing algorithms by eavesdropping machines seems another step towards the hybrid interconnected world that Douglas Coupland keeps writing about. 

Weirdly I was reading a book called The Age of Earthquakes that Douglas Coupland contributed to around the same time as all this happened and this page stood out. It feels like this happened to me!

I know the irony of feeding the online accumulation of a digital version of me (my cloudganger) by blogging all this. The machines will be able to connect the digital dots - if they are truly intelligent then over the next couple of days my social media feeds will be full of reassuring content about how the machines are benign and their intentions are pure. 

In addition to this blog, I write in an old fashioned analog journal most days. Now I'm starting to think a good reason to keep doing that is so some thoughts stay out of reach of the machines.

July 2022 month review - sporty summer

The Welsh for July is Gorffennaf - literally gorffen (end) and haf (summer), which given how it always tends to rain in August seems right. This July we had a three day heatwave that badly disrupted things and is possibly a sign of things to come unless humanity can collectively get its priorities in order and prevent the climate changing drastically. 

The heatwave coincided with the Grangetown Zoo. We also had a visitor stay with us during the hottest few days. She was a good deal younger than us so Cathy and I took advantage of having a helpful young person around and bought new phones. My previous phone had served me well since I bought it in January 2016. If this phone lasts a similar length of time it should be good until 2028. 

July was also a sporty month. I enjoyed watching the Euro 2022 football tournament, although I didn't get around to putting up the wall-chart for this one. It was an excellent tournament and a great example of how football is football, regardless which gender is playing it. The goal of the tournament was an audacious backheel that actually made me yelp with shock it was so unexpected. 

I had decided not to go to any friendly matches in the run up to the new season. My first game of the season was therefore at Taff's Well who were playing Ynyshir Albions in the league cup. 

My first goal of the season was a toe-poke from three yards out after the Ynyshir goalie dropped the ball from a cross. I went with my friend Paul, who also accompanied me to Barry's first league game of the season, over in Ammanford on a Friday night. A long trip after work!

On the last Saturday in July, I went up to Cwmbach to watch Cwmbach Royal Stars play in the Welsh Cup. I went with my friends Sara and Leanne, and we took their twins, who were too intent on watching the game to pose for a selfie.

We also met up with Allan, who is the club photographer and committee member. He is a great source of local football knowledge. I met Allan through my previous job and had been promising to go up to watch  Cwmbach for ages, so I was glad to finally make good on my promise and see him again.

To cap off a great game, Leanne won the half time raffle!

In addition to all the football, BT Sport were generous with their coverage of San Diego Padres games this month. I watched four and a half Padres games - against the Twins, Dodgers, Mariners and twice against the Giants - but I only saw them win once! I was beginning to think I was cursed until I finally saw them win a game at the fifth attempt of watching. 

And I shouldn't forget the two Blood Bowl games I managed to fit into the month as well.

And finally - and what a way to finish off - I got to meet up with my buddy Connor for a Saturday as well. 

Connor brought me some belated birthday presents, including the epic Lego minifigure at the top of the post, which he had designed himself on the minifigure printer in the Lego Shop in Birmingham. He really timed his visit perfectly because both the Lego Shop and The Entertainer toy shop were giving away free Lego on the day he was in town. A double free Lego day doesn't come along very often. We made the most of it!

June 2022 - a summer month of wet weekends

Well, June is gone and we are now over halfway through 2022. I had a busy month settling into my new job with plenty keeping me occupied at the weekends too. Unfortunately it felt like the weekends were wet when I wanted to be outside and sunny when I wanted to be inside!

At the start of the month I cashed in the Lego Store gift card that my former work colleagues gave me as a parting gift. Among the heap of Lego goodies I purchased was this epic set.

Yes, that's right. Optimus Prime, heroic leader of the noble Autobots, in all his original 1980s style glory! I remember this being an apex toy when I was a kid - I envied my friends who had one. This model actually converts from robot to truck and back without having to take the Lego apart. It's fab!

The Dog's Trail display of Snoopy statues located around Cardiff, Caerphilly and Porthcawl came to an end with a special weekend extravaganza outside City Hall. Cathy and I braved the rain to visit the statues, including Tally, which was one of the statues that we saw had been vandalised in the first few days of the trail. We were glad to see Tally had made a full recovery.

After seeing all the Snoopys we walked back through the city centre. There was a pop up shop selling American sports merchandise. Long story short, I got myself a new lid (as the kids say).

I spent the one sunny Saturday visiting a stamp fair for the first time since before the pandemic, mainly to attend the Annual General Meeting of the British Thematic Association. I wasn't intending to buy anything, but I picked up a few items for my 'Cymru a Gymraeg' collection that I'm working on. 

I got a couple of fun stamps for Cathy too. They feature the mascots for the Rio Olympics and Paralympics. 

Another wet Saturday was spent at the Grangetown Festival where the Friends of Grange Gardens had a stall. The weather was a mix of thundery downpours and bright sunshine. At least we were able to prove that our tea towels with a screenprint design of the park were both very absorbent and colour fast!

Our gazebo was also conveniently located next to the war memorial statue so I felt pretty safe when the lightning started because that is a massive lightning rod right there.

And I even had time to experement with some paint schemes for one of my Blood Bowl teams. I wanted to paint them chocolate and cream, and mixed my own pinky cream. But I wasn't too happy with that and bought a more yellowy shade on one of my trips to Firestorm Games. Here is a half and half shot with both shades of cream on show.

I had already played a game of Blood Bowl in June and I'm delighted to say that it wasn't too long before these guys were getting an outing. A game review will follow!

Snack of the Month - Bamba Peanut Butter Puffs

Cathy brought these home after taking a trip to Home Bargains. I opened them to enjoy while watching the final game of the Padres home series against the Dodgers last night.

These look a bit like Wotsits. Taste nothing like them though. Cathy reckoned they tasted like dehydrated peanut butter - "it starts off like packaging, and then turns into peanut butter". 50% of their ingredients is "peanut paste", so that's probably why.

If you like the taste of peanut butter - and I do! - then you will like these. I found them very moreish and the bowlful didn't last very long, barely an innings of the game I was watching. They are filling though. I didn't feel like eating another snack afterwards so that's a point in it's favour. However, they didn't eclipse Ding Dong, which was my snack of the month in January.

Also, I thought this was a fun weird foreign snack, but it turns out the company that makes them, Osem, is wholly owned by multinational conglomerate Nestle, which puts a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for them. 

My collection of collections, part 2: baseball cards

Baseball cards aren't a particularly random thing to collect (unlike souvenir monks). They are one of the most well-known things that people collect. Maybe not in the UK, though.

I first fell in love with baseball cards when I was 10 years old and we went on a family holiday to America. This was in 1987. The cards looked like this:

We had collected football stickers back home, and baseball cards were a bit like them, except that you got loads more in a pack for hardly any money at all, plus a stick of gum, and they were cards not flimsy stickers. The backs of the cards were covered in weird statistics and facts using incomprehensible terms. Of course I loved them. They were everything about America, that culture that was both foreignly weird and discomfortingly familiar. This was sports, but not as I knew it.

Baseball cards got me into baseball. I've since seen four major league baseball games while exploring North America, and been to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. I've watched the Boston Red Sox on Star Wars Night, and heard Art Garfunkel sing the American national anthem before a New York Mets game. But my first game was in San Diego, watching the Padres play the San Francisco Giants. Barry Bonds was the San Francisco star player and he had just been busted for using steroids, so the reaction to him from the Padres fans was savage.

Anyway, I have been a Padres fan since that first game, even though they aren't a successful team. As I've been collecting baseball cards I've tended to collect cards of Padres players, and one player in paticular, "Mr Padre", Tony Gwynn.

I still like random cards. I am about 40 cards away from completing the set of Topps cards from 1987 (there are hundreds in the set). I frequently ask friends who visit the USA to buy me a pack or two of baseball cards. But in terms of a collecting focus, Mr Padre is now it.

Tony Gwynn is a sporting hero of mine. He played for the Padres for 20 seasons. Baseball is all about the statistics and Tony's are stellar.  He won eight batting titles in his career, tied for the second-most in Major League Baseball history. He accumulated 3,141 career hits, one of just ten players to make 3,000 hits while only playing for one team. He had a .338 career batting average and never hit below .309 in any full season. Now what that means is that for about one in every three times Tony went up to bat he would get a hit and make it safely on base.  That ball comes at a batter at anything up to 95mph. Ordinary mortals can’t even see it.

In 1994, Tony was batting at .394 - almost a 40% success rate when the season was cut short because the baseball player's union called a general strike. The season ended in chaos. There was no World Series. In the summer of 94, Tony was in the form of his life, hitting .475 in 10 games in August just before the strike started. Tony was literally three hits short of .400 for the curtailed season. It's a classic 'what might have been' and remains the highest single season average since 1941.

4 of these cards look the same. But they aren't.

Tony played in the World Series in both 1984 and 1998; the only two times the Padres have made it to the World Series. In the World Series games he batted .371 - that's almost 4 hits every 10 times he went to bat. He was a 15-time All-Star - when the best players in the American League and the National League play against each other. He won seven Silver Slugger Awards for batting and five Gold Glove Awards for fielding. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007, his first year of eligibility.

Tony Gwynn died at the age of 54, from cancer. Among the many tributes paid to Tony, many people  commented on his loyalty to the Padres, staying in San Diego even though there were several opportunities for him to leave and play elsewhere. In fact, his willingness to accept less money to stay in San Diego than move to another team got him in trouble with other baseball stars, because they said he was driving down the market value for top players.

He is "Mr Padre". When I saw his plaque in the Hall of Fame, I felt very emotional.

I've grouped some studio portrait style cards

Baseball cards have been produced by a number of different manufacturers. In addition to the regular cards (known as 'base') some players will appear on special subsets within sets (know as 'inserts'). For example, players who make the All Star team, lead the league in particular statistics, or achieve notable milestones tend to feature on these extra cards. So, as you can imagine Tony Gwynn appeared on lots of baseball cards. There are actually over 10,000 listed on various baseball card indexes.

While most of the cards in my folder were printed while Tony was still playing, new cards are still being made. This retro style one was printed last year.

So there are still plenty of cards to collect, and probably new ones will be produced this year. Currently I have about 175 different ones. I'd like to collect 394 as that seems a suitable number. I think I need to set myself a target limit before the house fills up with oblongs of cardboard.

USA & Canada 2016 - Cooperstown; the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, and an unexpected incredible lake

Having left Massachusetts, we crossed state lines and arrived in Cooperstown, New York - a place of pilgrimage for thousands of baseball lovers every year. We stayed at the Tunnicliffe Inn, quite an old building by American standards but very pleasant.

Our instructions to get there were 'Drive up the main street until you reach the big flagpole. Turn left.'

Here's the flagpole.

Here is the main street.

And yet this fairly typical 'Smalltown, USA' is also the famous Cooperstown, home of this - the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum!

I'd asked some people in the know who said wearing team colours was appropriate. So I had taken my retro San Diego Padres shirt along. (It's a bit big on me these days, but hey!)

We had signed up and become members before we went as this represented a good value deal. Members get in free, get 10 per cent discount in the shop and so on. We made our money back in one trip. What I really appreciated is the way they will send you a 'team' membership card if you specify which team you follow.

The first stop in the self-guided tour is the Locker Room. This is a series of lockers done out with memorabilia from each major league baseball team in turn.

The Padres had their own locker, of course.

The rest of the museum was chock-full of interesting stuff, including the San Diego Chicken!

The Chicken used to advertise a local eatery between innings at San Diego games in the early 70s. It is widely credited as being the first 'mascot' character at a ball park. All the others, including the Padres' 'Swinging Friar' and Wally the Green Monster (who we saw at Fenway Park) have followed since.

In another cabinet was a batting helmet worn and signed by the greatest ever Padre, Tony Gwynn.

There were tons of other exhibits too. Ranging from supporter attire...

...to bats used to set and break records...

...to stadium giveaways and food vendor garb.

In a big exhibit about Babe Ruth I discovered one of his early schoolmasters was the very stern-looking 'Brother Matthias'(!)

In another part of the museum, Cathy met the Philly Phanatic.

After the museum we visited the Hall of Fame itself. This I found quite moving; a really beautiful tribute to the great players of the past.

I was amused to read this disclaimer as I walked in, though.

I guess a lot of know-it-alls complain about inaccuracies they find on the plaques, and this is pre-emptive.

The first five inductees get their own section.

The hall is laid out very well and as long as you know the year a player was inducted, they are easy to find. We found Tony Gwynn's plaque without any trouble.

We still had some time and some glorious sunshine to have a bit of a wander round the actual town, marvelling at their quintessential Americanness. We particularly liked this church that had a church-shaped birdbox outside.

There are also a lot of shops selling baseball souvenirs, as you would expect. We bought some (cough!). You can buy pretty much anything baseball-related. This is the only time I have ever seen baseball card vending machines.

I also really liked this artwork print on the wall of the restaurant where we ate dinner. Unfortunately I couldn't find a shop selling prints like it or I would have bought one. (Still, taking a photo is cheaper, I suppose.)

And then the last surprise of Cooperstown. It's next to a nine-mile long lake. When we arrived the first evening, we walked down to the shore just as the sun was setting. It was magical.

And so after an all-too-brief stay is was time to bid Cooperstown farewell. And not just Cooperstown, but New York State as well. In fact the whole of the United States, because we were heading North. For the border with Canada. To Ontario.