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the laide carte family history - background

In 1973 a group of kids from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne held a euchre marathon.
It lasted 14 days and 3 minutes.
It still affects us.
Jennie collects card decks.
John, Jennie, Neil, and I still get together once a year for a weekend of card games.

At the 1999 Games, we played with what seemed like the ugliest cards known to mankind. To ease our eyes, I palmed the deck and convinced Jennie that the cards had ended up somewhere else. A black hole, perhaps.

Then I came home, fired up the pen and notepad, and outlined the history of the Ugly Cards family. Some time at the scanner and word processor, and the original version of this appeared.

I sent copies to the other reunionees:

Hi, everyone! You may remember in September that I accused Jennie of having the most butt-ugly deck of cards I'd ever seen. Imagine my surprise to find out that there's actually a family of almost famous cork importers, called Bad Cards. Sheesh! Who knew?
Anyway, I started looking around on the 'Net and discovered that there are several books about these folks - but all out of print.

Well, you can buy pretty much everything on eBay I've heard. So I spent some time there, and sure enough, there was somebody peddling several copies of one of the books. (Something about "They fell off the truck...") So I snapped 'em up in a New York minute (what the heck is that, anyway), and each of you gets your very own copy. Enjoy!

(By the way, I also searched on the Web for the guy who wrote this, but it turns out he died a few years ago in an accident when his horse was spooked by his wife's dog pack. The trials and tribulations of the almost rich, I guess...)

The greatest compliment was Jennie telling me that she briefly thought it was for real.

The printed pamphlet has descriptive text under each of the family "photos", but I couldn't figure out how to do that in CSS. So you'll have to position the mouse over each image to read those comments. Kinda like a secret message decoder ring.

Thank the gods for AltaVista's Babel Fish translation service! Oh, by the way, "Franquia" and "Gœta" are made up names, so there's no translation. Not everything has a hidden meaning. Honest.

At the next year's reunion I returned the card deck and put it in the console of their mini-van. I wonder if Jennie ever noticed it?

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