Hello, everybody!
My name is Robert S. Lancaster - "RSL" for short.
I am a 54-year-old (55 in one week!) collector of playing cards living in Salem, Oregon with my Better Half, Susan.
I have been collecting decks of playing cards - especially decks with custom courts - actively since the 1990s, but bought my first deck with custom courts (a "Peanuts" deck with Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown portraying the Jacks, Queens and Kings, and Snoopy on the Jokers) in 1968, at ten years of age!
I've lost track of how many decks I have in my collection, but it is more than 2,000.
Some here may have seen my old web site about the hobby, "The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards" (now defunct, but a partial archive of it can be viewed here:
NOTE: SOME OF THE IMAGE LINKS DO NOT WORK!
http://web.archive.org/web/20041214091346/http://members.aol.com/rslancastr/blgupc/blgupc.htmI heard about this place from Emmanuel Jose, who I met over at unitedcardists.com.
I am NOT a cardist/flourisher, nor am I likely to be, as I only have the use of one hand - my right hand.
See, I am what is called a Left-side Hemiplegic ( the muscles in the left half of my body do not function very well, the result of a MASSIVE stroke I experienced in 2008).
The most obvious effects of this:
- My left hand is always closed in a fist of sorts
- My left arm is always clenched close to my torso
- My left foot and leg do not work, so I live life in a motorized wheel chair.
Aside from my card collecting, I was the author of a series of DOS-based Shareware games in the 1990s:
- MicroLink Yaht (MLYAHT), a Yahtzee clone.
- MicroLink Shut The Box (MLSHUT), an old dice game
- MicroLink Otra (MLOTRA), A Simon-like game
- MicroLink Loyd (MLLOYD), the "15" sliding tile puzzle/game
- MicroLink Push Your Luck (MLPUSH), a dice game
- MicroLink Crux (MLCRUX), a puzzle/game
and became known for my skeptical web sites in the past ten years or so:
- "Stop Kaz" (
www.StopKaz.com)
- "Stop Sylvia Browne" (
www.StopSylvia.com).
In my spare time, I write over-long introductions and put things in bullet-pointed lists:
- for
- no
- apparent
- reason
- whatsoever
If you aren't bored to tears already, you can read more about me here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._LancasterI can be contacted via:
- eMail (RSLancastr@aol.com)
- Facebook (
http://www.facebook.com/RSLancastr)
- Twitter (
http://www.twitter.com/RSLancastr)