Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Updated 5:30 p.m.
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6:00 a.m.
Local news at Sports Collectors Daily, headlined Babe x 2: New 1914 Baltimore News Card Discovered:

A previously unknown 1914 Baltimore Orioles baseball team card featuring a young Babe Ruth has been discovered in the estate of a Rhode Island man.

The card was issued by the Baltimore News while Ruth was playing in the International League, not long after he signed a professional contract. It is slated to be sold next spring along with another card featuring Ruth from the same set, by Robert Edward Auctions, based in Watchung, New Jersey.

“It’s one of the most significant new card discoveries in the history of collecting,” Lifson said. “It is very rare to find any previously undiscovered baseball card of such interest and extraordinary significance that it could leave even the most advanced and knowledgeable collectors in the field stunned.” ...

But wait... there's more:

Incredibly, this card was found along with a 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card, only the tenth example ever discovered from the rare regional set. That individual Ruth card, considered Ruth’s “rookie” card is often considered to be the single most important baseball card in the world. This card features Ruth as an unknown minor league rookie straight out of St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys.

Regrettably, the story does not name the collector or his family, and doesn't offer "Lifson's" first name, but it wasn't difficult to find that Robert Lifson is president of Robert Edward Auctions. About the collector, the story says,

The cards were saved for decades by a Providence, Road Island-area family. The grandfather of the consignors was a collector who held a modest sampling of cards from several eras, ranging from a few 1910 era tobacco cards to 1970s TCMA collector issues, and a little bit of everything in-between. From his conversations with the family, Lifson learned the gentleman was a somewhat casual collector, not part of the organized hobby, simply collecting on his own for his own personal enjoyment. Though these cards were the prizes of his collection, their great significance to the card collecting world was unknown to him. The Babe Ruth rookie card was so rare during his collecting days that it was not yet formally documented, checklisted or even known to exist in the organized hobby.

The owner apparently had some connection to the Baltimore area and was a great fan of Babe Ruth. When the grandfather passed away in 1985, the family put his cards away. ...

Both cards are to be auctioned in the spring, with opening bids set at $10,000 each.

Free directory assistance: 1-800-Free-411 offers free directory assistance if you'll listen to a 15-second ad. (You can also use it online at free411.com without the ad.)

At Tech Crunch, the business story (Jingle Networks Has Now Raised Over $60 million):

Like Skype, the main attraction of Jingle Networks is to destroy a fat existing market. Skype gave users a way to bypass costly telephone calls by routing them over the internet for free. Jingle Networks, through its 1-800-Free-411 service, is helping to destroy the $8 billion U.S. 411 market by making those calls free as well.

So while carriers continue to charge an average of $1.25 for each 411 call, Jingle Networks is providing the same service for free and adding a fifteen second advertisement after you request a phone number but before you are given the results. Consumers don’t seem to mind the advertising - less than a year after launch they claimed to have taken 3% of the total U.S. market for 411 calls, with 450,000 calls per day (out of 6 billion total yearly 411 calls).

Today Jingle Networks announced a fourth round of financing - $30 million from Goldman Sachs and Hearst Corporation, at a valuation of around $150 million. This comes after a $26 million round in April 2006, a $5 million round in December 2005 and a small angel round of financing last year....

...Ultimately 411 is just another way for people to search for information, and Google will clearly be eyeing this space as the company matures.

Weird politics: The tackiest political ad ever? You decide: Watch it here.

WTVF in Nashville's report (Corker Calls for RNC to Pull Negative Ad) begins, "In a strange twist of events, Bob Corker is calling for an ad that attacks his opponent (Rep. Harold Ford D-Tenn.) to be taken off the air."

Here's how it ends: "The Corker Campaign has requested that Channel 5 take the attack ad off the air. By law, Channel 5 cannot remove the ad until the Republican National Committee makes the request."

When Real Life isn't enough: Rhode Island blogger Alan Fraser -- Phantasmablogia is the blog at his extensive My Duck Soup site -- challenges what he calls my "case on Second LIfe" (this post) and goes on to explain what the virtual world does for him:

In SL, I am a rock god. That aspect is fantasy but the people who come to my shows like the music or they wouldn't be there. I could present as an aging anachronism on a real life stage or I can do it through a rock god persona in SL....

If you want to get a taste of what SL is really like, come to Old Salt's Pub at 5:00 p.m. (Pacific Time) tonight and catch my act. It's hard rock and I don't waste a second dredging up cover tunes from the past. I don't care about the Beatles and didn't even like them that much the first time around. I call myself Silas Scarborough but it is Alan Fraser live and everyone who attends knows that. It is, by far, the wildest musical stage show in SL and, as soon as you can show me a way to present dancers with anti-gravity machines in RL then maybe I'll believe there's some benefit to trying to present this in a 'real' world.

If you don't catch any other part of the act, do stop by for the last one. That's when I set all the bombs off and light all the fireworks. It's always "Flying Without a Parachute" and it's a tune in which I turn off all the backing tracks and play, solo on the Stratocaster, whatever comes into my head. They've been calling me the Hendrix of SL and I'll never be so vain as to believe that but tonight I think I'll go for the title. I've been doing a jam that's kind of reminiscent of "Voodoo Chile" and tonight I may roll it out live. I love playing live and SL is the only practical way I can do it. I hope you can catch the show....

There's more, and it's all interesting. It's another chance at life, life as he would have it be, not the cards he was dealt.

Travel story: Tokyo hotel steals guests' towels.

Political phone spam: I was out in the yard planting garlic on a day off. The screen door was ajar, and the phone rang. It could have been several family members or someone from work stymied by code.

I headed inside, dropping a trail of soil as I tore off my gardening gloves.

It was a recording asking me to read bulk mail that had already arrived. Near the end, it named a candidate, but he had not approved the ad -- it came from a third party.

How do we stop this? I do not want to be interrupted and awakened by rude politicians or their supporters. Do they think disturbing me will somehow endear them, will win my vote?

Is there a Do Not Call List that lets you skip political marketing? How do we get politicians to outlaw their own spam?

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2 Comments

Alan Fraser said:

Thanks for the coverage, Sheila! I wrote the article when you said SL would be good for people in prison as I thought people might like a different perspective on the jail. It's true that SL can be a substitute for reality but it can also be an extension of it and the trick is knowing the difference. Thanks again!

Link | October 24, 2006 9:56 AM
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Nicole said:

Thanks for writing what all of us have been thinking and saying, the political spam phone calls have to stop! Whats worse, I can't tell who's calling because they block the numbers they are calling from!

Link | October 24, 2006 11:07 PM
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