Topps Never Stops.....

....figuring ways to separate collectors from their cash. Latest example is this five card 'set' that I was given as a late Father's Day gift.

This is a 'wax' wrapper that contained five Orioles 5x7 cards of their current stars done more of less in the style of the 1955 set.

A word here about Topps in general and the set in particular.. the '55 set isn't my favorite of the decade, not by a long shot. But it does have it's charms. And these are certainly attractive cards. I understand there are larger individual prints of these also being sold. I got on the Topps mailing list and if I paid any attention to their frequent emails I'd probably know more.

I suppose asking if there is a point to these types of things other than to make a few dollars would be stupid. Making dollars IS the point. And they sold at least one set of the Orioles.

Here are the cards, and looking at them again brings up something else. Haven't we seen all these photos before. I have very little 'contact' with current sets but these all look very familiar.

Anyway, here they are:

Just for the sake of comparing and contrasting here is an original '55, Orioles lefty Billy O'Dell.

And finally, if you use Google to store your images maybe you've found something like this in your folders:

I had scanned a whole pile of the '68 Topps game inserts and this set and when I did a mass upload weird stuff was happening. I thought my scanner had flipped out on me. But I poked around and found that Google somehow makes these animated gifs out of multiple pictures whether you ask it to or not. Google is starting to take over the world and it's scaring me.