As for Topic of the Day...
I'm not exactly sure what triggered the interest, but I wanted to be an astronomer. I wanted to look at and into the night sky for a living. Constellations, magnitudes, nebulae, galaxies, planets... I even wrote to NASA and a bunch of observatories asking if they had any free material they could send me... And they did! I particularly remember a package of posters that the Goddard Space Flight Center sent me: the Space Shuttle, the Solar System, the Night Sky... All the posters were ones that were currently on sale in their gift shop and through their catalog, and they sent them to me for free!