Meet Upper Deck's latest and, by light years, most disgusting baseball card innovation yet. What you see to the right are two extremely rare "Hair Cut Signatures" cards-- one of George Washington and another of Geronimo-- and yes, those are actual strands of their hair.
Of course, hairs from hundreds of years old corpses are a bit too delicate to actually place in packs of cards, so apparently what you get is a card with code that you can redeem for the disgusting memento-- which, as far as anybody can tell, is real. Most of the cards come from a guy named John Reznikoff, one of the foremost collectors of corpse hair in the world. Or something.
According to the Wall Street Journal article on this horrifying subject, "A letter accompanying a lock of hair [Reznikoff] says belonged to Lincoln, written by the son of the surgeon who attended to the dying president, reads: 'I have in my possession. ... a lock of Lincoln's hair which was presented to my father by Mrs. Lincoln.' "
So, uh... I guess that about settles it?
Other historical figures who have taken part in this bizarre new marketing technique include Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, Beethoven, Charles Dickens, Marilyn Monroe, King George III, Ronald Reagan and Babe Ruth.
Naturally, this disgusting, morbid new twist in card collecting has been brought on by the virtual collapse of the trading card industry:
"The good old days of building a set, one 15-card pack at a time, are pretty much over," [editor of Card Trade, Scott] Kelnhofer says. While cheaper packs today go for around $2, he says, "the card makers' survival is predicated on attracting and keeping the collectors who make the big-ticket purchases."
Big ticket purchases, that is, like famous corpse hair.