To anyone visiting this message board, it soon becomes obvious that most people here are very well read not only about castration, castration fantasies, and eunuchs, but about a wide variety of subjects as well.

I am on some other forums that focus on various other subjects, and the members there are also very well read about a wide variety of subjects.

I don't sense that same level of reading and studying by the general population. Many people I encounter out there in the world seem to have little or no interest in reading beyond the newspaper, and many don't even seem to do that.

I've come to the conclusion that people who actively post and contribute to forums like this one, read and are more informed about many subjects than the average person. Am I correct about that?

What do people who don't read do, just sit and let their minds vegetate? I feel sorry for those who have no interest in reading and learning, there's so much they're missing.

they watch a lot of tv, mainly sit-coms from the looks of it.

River

Personally, I don't watch TV. The only time it comes on is for occasional news and to watch a DVD. I read a lot, about a variety of things. Right now, I'm starting Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - again.

Paolo,

It is an excellent book. His publisher told him that for every mathematical equation that he put into the book that he would lose 100,000 readers.

If you have seen any of Hawking's work that wold be more like 1,000,000 readers.

Fortunately, he put none in his book. Happy Reading!

Books? You mean Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue.

Well, people with enough confidence in their writing skill to post on web boards are likely to be more literate than average. I'd be surprised to find people who wrote well but didn't read well. The two are usually inseparable. In fact, advice from writers about how to become a better writer (essays by G.B. Shaw, E.M. Forster, and Stephen King leap to mind) often starts with becoming an assiduous reader.

Literature as traditionally understood is losing its cultural currency (until the start of the 1970s, writers were understood to be leaders of society in the English speaking world - today, that idea would seem luidicrous to most young people; writers have become entertainers, above street performers, below Brangelina), so let's not preen over our proficiency at what is swiftly becoming an archaism.

And every-one is now "Boged" down .. learning to write -- and "Spell Checkers" and translators etc ..WOW. N3RF