George Carlin, "In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!"

I think the accomplishment is not the actual reading. I think the accomplishment is the foregoing of all the myriad distractions that are competing for your leisure hours. I became a voracious reader in my teens. I'd read on public transit, while waiting for appointments and in lines, before bed, on rainy days and while waiting for the few good shows 3 channels offered and during the commercials. Later on, I'd also read during breaks and meals at work. I read a lot and it was an easy choice.
Flash forward a few decades and VHS/DVDs, electronic gaming, channel shifting, HBO and its ilk, the Internet, PVRs, online gaming, smart phones, streaming and all the social media flavours, are all brand new competitors for your finite leisure time. I still read a lot but it's mostly short articles and posts. Now my books are mostly read in short increments while waiting to pick my wife up at the subway. So hats off to those of you can manage your time better than me.

It wouldn't have gotten to that stage with me. Having had dogs in my life since childhood, not being a dog lover would immediately be a deal breaker. There's no way I'm commiting to a back half of life without dogs being part of the happy household.

He found out in 2012. He met her in 1993 while she was working as an au pair for his sister. He was 44, she was 28.
His 1st marriage was ending and they hooked up. He didn't want kids and not surprisingly, lol, she didn't either. She was from Malaysia and he fought to get her accepted as an immigrant. The government finally agreed, despite irregularities in her birth certificate and papers! She continued her deception by monthly consumption of feminine products.
Everything was fine till around 2010, when she started partying in skimpy clothes and corresponding with younger men. Simultaneously, a visiting relative shared a rumour that she was born male. The cat's out of the bag and he sues for an annulment.
It sure looks less like true love and more like she was scamming from the get-go, just to get her immigration granted.

This is something you share early on in the relationship or take to the grave. Then again, it could be one of those cases where the baby was gender reassigned for medical reasons and they both found out after the fact.

I don't think this is as much a function of formal education, as a reflection of people's inate curiosity about the world and their ability to retain interesting trivia picked up by osmosis. By way of example, we might all have been taught about this incident in Ancient history, but I doubt that too many of us can recall all the surrounding facts, motivations and players. Rather, it was years of this incident being referred to in pop culture-Shakespeare, TV/movies and printed humour, that has cemented Caesar, Brutus and the Ides of March into our collective memories. The original meme is clever and counts on our shared exposure to that tidbit of history for it's success. The new meme counts on our incredulity that someone could sleepwalk through life without picking up this bit of historical trivia.

Start out with a larger than half-circle high opening in a half high wall. Bottom half circle, 3 o'clock through 9 o'clock, is easy-just lay them upward from 6 o'clock using a half-circle template to ensure their proper placement. Top half circle involves using a properly shaped and braced wooden form that the bricks are layed on. The rest of the wall is built to enclose the upper half circle of bricks. The support is then removed.

Special masonry chisels with or without wide blades and power tools with appropriate blades. Check out Amazon under brick cutting.

My leadhand loved inflicting his world class death farts on his coworkers. The first we'd know, while sitting at the table during breaks or meals, is when we'd notice his silent shaking from surpressed laughter and seconds later the agony began. Horrible and lingering, they were his trademark. One winter morning, while waiting for his bus, he innocently let one rip just prior to boarding. He got on the crowded bus, made his way to the middle, and because of the heat, HE UNZIPPED HIS PARKA! Though, ordinarily, he never would hurt innocent bystanders, he'd not taken the containing properties of his knee lenght parka into account. He took great pleasure in describing the progress, as his foul miasma silently radiated outward, of pinched faces, surpressed gags and questioning, accusing looks. I've never seen him laugh as hard.

You didn't notice, because at that time you were looking at cutting edge, state of the art CGI. Rapid, relatively speaking, advances in computers, programming and technology means amazing becomes quaint in years, not decades or generations. There's an interesting article called, "The Ultimate History of CGI in Film", that really highlights the rate of rapid advance in CGI.