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Going in for X-rays on my wrist tomorrow, praying it’s not anything bad and the cartilage is just irritated.

Grrr season starts very soon, not a good time :(((


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Definitely!!


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And its not just pollution that lowers testosterone levels either. Air pollution and certain contaminants (including pesticides and lead) are associated with increased risk of autism, for example.

Once upon a time lead was everywhere but since the mid 80s there have been serious efforts to remove it from products and the environment and there is a correlation between that decrease and a decrease in crime rates across societies that made those efforts. (The same correlation also exists between decreasing crime rates and the emergence of FPS video games, funnily enough.)
 
That's probably fair enough though. Only a very small amount of people who are called "pedophiles" actually fit the definition. I'm pretty sure it means a specific age range, and there are different names for those attracted to toddlers, teens and such.
That is true. There is a whole bunch of psychological wank about it.
 

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That's a really ugly url link so here

The Man Behind the Hemingway Myth
A new PBS documentary offers a fresh look at a great and tragic writer who disappeared into a self-created macho stereotype


Early next month, timed to the sixtieth anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death, PBS will air Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s long-awaited three-part, six-hour look at this most iconic of iconic American writers. In a culture where screens have beat out paper and ink as the medium for gathering information and in so doing have turned us into scanners with atrophied attention spans, it’s something of an irony that it would take the visual experience of a documentary—full of stunning archival photos and deft commentary by the likes of Edna O’Brien and Tobias Wolff—to inspire a return to the page to experience the work of the writer who, as Mr. Wolff puts it, “changed all the furniture in the room.”

Some writers write; others alter the course of literature by the importance of the ideas they express or by the style of that expression. Hemingway did both, creating an original voice that remains one of the most influential in the English language. While still in his early 20s, as a newly married veteran of the Great War living in Paris among a group of expatriate American writers who would become known as the “Lost Generation,” he codified how to write what he called a “true” sentence—a grammatically simple shard of flint that, like the stories he told with them, distilled a potent essence.

Hemingway’s tone was designed as a match for the awful things he’d witnessed and that test human character—war, broken loyalty, death.
His tone was designed as a match for the awful things he’d witnessed and that test human character—war, broken loyalty, death—and for the magnificent things that restore our souls and courage: a fine painting, true love, a winning ticket at the horse races, the smell of orange rinds in a fire. First with his short stories about growing up in the woods of northern Michigan and later with novels based on his life in Europe—“The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”—he became an international literary celebrity. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

By then, he’d played the bearded macho-man armed with a gun and a typewriter—spoiling for danger, tough women and a stiff drink—for so long that the caricature stuck. The masculine stereotype continues to complicate our ability to see the person lost inside the testosterone legend, much less to extricate the writing from the writer. So numerous are the photographs of Hemingway on safari, at the corrida, charming his next wife, hooking a big one, behind the typewriter—almost always shirtless—that the visual lore has become intermingled with scenes from his novels and journalism in a way that makes it hard to recall what’s fact or fiction.

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Hemingway with his cats in the 1940s.
PHOTO: POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
But all you have to do to get past the legend is to read a little of his work. “If it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it,” Hemingway once wrote. “Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—three dimensions and if possible four—that you can write the way I want to.” In terms of complexity, he was essentially describing himself and his unusually eventful life.

Hemingway, a country boy from outside Chicago, was born in 1899, astride two centuries that were divided in custom and convention not by a year but an eon. In the pages of Life, Time, Look and Esquire, he took on as a reporter many of the same subjects he had already treated in fiction, inviting readers to wonder if the first-person narrator of his novels was the self-same journalist on assignment. If his characters were his alter-egos, you can imagine him thinking, why couldn’t he be an alter-ego of his characters?

Trying to figure out what’s not being said and why; slipping into the internal dialogue of a broken mind; asking who the I in the I really is—these are just a few of the techniques Hemingway developed that changed the boundaries of fiction and how it was written. Stripping his prose of all ornament, he wrote like a member of the Bauhaus following the dictum that “form follows function.” The material he took up—rape, abortion, impotence, cowardice, suicide, adultery—were unprettified realities that literature would no longer be able to skirt. Above all, as he codified in his “iceberg theory,” he recognized that what was omitted from a story outweighed in power what was left in.

Almost a century after the publication of his first book of stories, “In Our Time,” Hemingway remains an inescapable figure in American literature. As Amanda Vaill says in the documentary, “people have been copying him for nearly a hundred years and they haven’t succeeded in equaling what he did.” That, in a nutshell, is how the canon becomes the canon: It’s a record established through time of the greatest works that have inspired and influenced the greatest writers.

“I practiced writing and studied Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Stein and Hemingway,” Ralph Ellison once said. “Especially Hemingway. I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story.” You cannot fully appreciate the individual achievement of Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” in other words, unless you understand the books by Hemingway that influenced it.

It may also come as a surprise that Hemingway, according to Edna O’Brien, also transcended gender. “Parts of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ could have been written by a woman,” she says on camera. “It is the androgyny in a man or a woman that allows them, even if briefly, not utterly, to be able to put themselves inside the skin of the opposite thing.” Hemingway didn’t just imagine a man swapping gender identities with his female lover in the posthumously published novel “The Garden of Eden.” He and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, cut and dyed their hair platinum; in the bedroom, he called her Pete and she called him Catherine.

What’s so heartbreaking about the life of this great artist is his violent final act. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun; he was one of five people to commit suicide in three generations of the Hemingway family. Barely past middle age, he looked by then like an elderly, decrepit man, his hair thinning and white and his behavior paranoid and increasingly bizarre. He had begun to speak in what he called “Indian” talk, a gross caricature of the beautifully distilled prose style he’d pioneered.

With what we now know about traumatic brain injuries, it is hard to imagine Hemingway wasn’t suffering from more than just clinical depression.
This strangeness was caught on camera in a rare interview he gave after winning the Nobel that is featured in the documentary. In it, he reads a series of prewritten answers from cue cards with the halting confidence of a child, randomly pronouncing marks of punctuation: “The book that I am writing on at present is about Africa it’s people in the part that I know them the animals comma and the changes in Africa since I was there last period.”

With what we now know about traumatic brain injuries, it is hard to imagine Hemingway wasn’t suffering from more than just clinical depression. The documentary points out that he had been prone to concussions and suffered nine brutal blows to the head in the course of his life, as well as pulverizing his brain daily with booze. In his 1937 novel “To Have and Have Not,” he describes the various ways that people commit suicide, including the tool he would end up using himself: one of “those well-constructed implements…that blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger.” Hemingway’s final act obliterated the man but not the myth.
 
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