Booknotes (NBR): H.G. Wells

I just finished reading a collection of H.G. Wells' short fiction, called A Dream of Armageddon:  The Complete Supernatural Tales.  The following passage struck me; it's from a story entitled "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper."  One morning, instead of receiving a newspaper for the current year, 1931, he receives a paper from the future:  1971.  His maid accidentally throws it away, and so he can only describe bits and pieces of it to the narrator.  Here's the narrator's response after hearing that the idea of individual nations was more or less obselete in 1971:

NBR: Pop Music IQ

I just took a quiz on Sporcle that asks you to listen to a series of short clips and then identify the song.  The songs are #1 hits in the US between 1958 and 2009.  They're in chronological order and offered a nice glimpse of my pop music IQ.  Here are the songs.  The ones I got right are in bold/italics:

NBR: Conrad, Briefly

On Tourism ... and Imagination

"An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a hundred pounds round-the-world tickets in their pockets.  There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs." 

 *****

"The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought.  The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion."

-- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Introducing the NBR (Non-Baseball wRiting)

The beginning of the baseball season is the leanest time for me as a baseball writer.  You'd expect the opposite, I guess.  But as someone who's more of an analyst than a scout, I'm much better at talking about what has happened rather than what's going to happen. Plus, I try to resist the temptation to draw sweeping conclusions from a week and half of baseball games, or less than ten percent of an actual season.
So let me take the opportunity to unify all of my various writing efforts in this one place.  Baseball will take up most of my time.  But I'd like to fill the gaps with a number of other projects, efforts and things that I just wanna talk about. I figured there's no sense in creating 8 separate blogs for my various interests; I'll just change my baseball blog to "baseball plus."  To make things easier for my readership (both of you), any non-baseball blog will be clearly labeled NBR:  Non-Baseball wRiting.
I'm working on my first effort, which should be up in a few days.

Happy Spring.  The Jason Heyward era has begun.