Would You Like To Read About A Masturbating Wizard? Who Wouldn't?

Alex Shvartsman’s second Unidentified Funny Objects anthology is out today, featuring stories by some of the funniest guys in SF.  I am not in this edition, proving that Alex has improved his taste since the first book.
But the second book has some slam-dunk authors in it, like Ken Liu, Robert Silverberg, Jim Hines, and Mike Resnick.  I anticipate it’s gonna be full of clever, funny stories, as the last book was.  And to whet your appetite for this book, I’m linking to my rather bizarre story from UFO 1, “One-Hand Tantra,” about a man who casts spells by…
…well, I’ll just give you the opener.

“The path of most wizards is solitary,” Loefwyn’s father had told him when his power had first manifested itself. “Your path, my dearest and only child, is more solitary still.”
To this day, Loefwyn wished he had never become a masturbatician.
As his father had promised, Loefwyn’s singular sex magic had given him a decent living. He’d just scraped up enough cash to build the obligatory wizard’s tower, a ribbed rock column jutting up to advertise his unique talents. Masturbaticians were rare, effective ones even more so . . . and both Loefwyn and his spells were potent indeed. Intrigued merchants dropped by to witness the town’s newest oddity–even as they hesitated to shake his hand.
Now, royalty–minor, vicious royalty, but royalty still–had hired him. Enspell Griselda the One-Eyed, and Loefwyn’s success was all but guaranteed.

You can read the whole thing here – and if you like that, then buy the new book.  If you don’t like it, then assume that they’ve gotten much better at filtering out things like this and buy the new book.

Creative Solutions, Or: I Bet That's Why That Guy Had $12 Million In The First Place

From the obituary of Robert Taylor:
“Robert Taylor knew he had a winning idea for a product the moment he thought of it.  Looking at the mess a bar of soap had left on his bathroom sink, he spotted a gap in the market for a bottled liquid soap dispensed by a pump. Realizing bigger companies would quickly copy his idea, he borrowed $12 million – every penny his business was worth – and ordered 100 million little plastic pumps from US manufacturers, creating a back order so huge that no rival could buy pumps for at least a year.”
Props to you, Robert Taylor.

The I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon

Just a reminder: the I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon is next Saturday, at our house.  The ISSTBN Marathon is a long-standing tradition, where people gather to watch movies that they feel guilty about having gotten to this fine age without having seen.
(Someone always tries to go, “Well, there’s this movie I love…”  No.  This is about films you have not seen.)
My choice for this upcoming film festival: Clue, which I feel guilty about not because I feel it’s a great movie (I don’t think it is), but rather because I feel that as a former Rocky Horror-obsessed lad, I should have seen Tim Curry in all of his best roles.  Our pal Lucy is seeing The Wrath of Khan because Jesus Christ, don’t you know you don’t get your soul until you’ve watched Kirk and Spock battle Ricardo Montalban?  And Mel wants to watch Flashdance, which I’m not entirely sure how she feels guilty about not seeing it, but then again she’s a girl who loves Dirty Dancing and I assume there’s something about estrogen and 80s dance movies that is like an Innsmouth call to the deep.
So if you’re local and feel like watching, the rules are at our Evite, and just lemme know that you’re attending.  I feel like we need a couple of dramas, or at least a movie produced somewhere outside of the “1982 to 1985” range that we’re currently sporting, so all film lovers are welcome and loved as long as they choose a good movie.
A good movie, mind you.  I chose My Dinner With Andre the last time.  I’ll let the Doctor speak for me on that choice.

Is The Dog Whisperer Doing Some Weird Kind Of Good?

I didn’t expect a post on Cesar Millan to be the hot discussion of the month, but lots of people weighed in on what a jerk Cesar is.  The Dog Whisperer’s training is barbaric and unscientific! people cried, just before LiveJournal’s automated spam-handlers blocked their frothing anti-Millan links.  He’s harmful!  He’s propagating horrible disinformation about how dogs behave!
All true.  Cesar’s concept of “the pack” is actually hokum.  The study that came to the conclusion that “dogs have a strict hierarchy” was from putting different groups of unrelated, captive wolves into a pen and letting them battle it out, which is kind of like throwing various families into a lightless prison and assuming their behavior is normal.  As it turns out, there’s an alpha dog when they’re jammed together into a survival mode found nowhere in nature, but in real life wolves tend to travel in family structures.  The dogs follow their parents because their parents have been proven to be responsible.
So Cesar is peddling theories that don’t play any more.  And I’m fully willing to admit that his habit of throat-punching dogs to get their attention probably isn’t for the best, as is his theory that if a dog is scared, you “flood” the dog with his terror so he gets used to it.
Yet still, Cesar’s helped me.  His thoughts on why dogs bark may be completely akimbo, but his practical advice of “Don’t yell, just stay calm and show the dog that there’s nothing to worry about” got Shasta to bark a lot less.
And I think Cesar’s helped a lot of people, by disseminating a real truth that most of Cesar’s foes tend to overlook: as the world’s most popular dog trainer, the constant and enduring lesson of every one of his shows is, if the dog behaves badly, it’s your fault.  You are providing improper feedback for the dog.
Which is really valuable.  Thanks to Cesar, when Shasta misbehaves, I don’t get mad at her – I wonder what I could be doing better.  Which makes me less likely to mistreat her, or get frustrated.  And maybe the feedback that Cesar tells me to provide is wrong, but that conceptual shift that “It’s my job to show her what to do” is such a change that it has all sorts of behavioral fallout for me.  It’s not the damn dog, it’s the damn me.
Which is something that gets overlooked a lot.  Not to mention that Cesar’s popularity brings professional dog trainers to the fore, and makes people more likely to seek them out, thus maximizing the chance that someone will find a dog trainer who goes, “Oh God no, don’t listen to that fool.”  For all that people hate Cesar, he’s actually doing a lot of good that gets overlooked.
This isn’t a defense of Cesar.  I’m just fascinated by how complex life is.  This is a case where a self-taught dog “expert” got catapulted to the fore by virtue of working with some celebrities, and while he’s spreading some horrible habits among dog owners, quietly he’s also propagating a set of tools that’s also genuinely helpful to dogs.  And I think that as people, we tend to go, “This is good!” or “This is bad!”, in most cases it’s a weirdly mixed bag where yeah, you wish that Cesar wasn’t as popular as he was because he’s got some really toxic effects, but on the other hand if nobody had heard of Cesar Millan then a lot of people would still be blaming their dogs and not themselves.
It’s not all good, or all bad.  It’s this weird, “Well, kinda….” where I think that if you’re honest, you look at it and find it hard to nail it down exactly what sort of effect this all has.
Life’s messy.  Just like our dogs.

Would I Have Supported The Government Shutdown?

Well, the government is down to life support at this point, and the only people happy about it seem to be Tea Party members.  The rest of the world sees this as a massive dysfunction of our politics, but the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives look at this rebellion against a Congressional vote, an electorial referendum, and a Supreme Court ruling as a noble stance.  Obamacare will ruin America if it’s passed.  Nothing is more important than stopping this hazardous and poorly-engineered law.  Thus, they’re pulling out all the stops to shut this down.
…which is really what I wanted when Iraq and the Patriot Act went on the table. I bashed the spineless Democrats for rolling over to Dubya, was infuriated that they didn’t put up any major resistance to what turned out to be legitimately terrible intel and lawmaking (provided, may I remind you, largely by Republicans), and felt impotent as the Dems donned their patriot flags and went along with it.
In fact, the one guy who didn’t flow with the crowd wound up being President.  And though he turned out to be almost every bit the warmaker and privacy-destroyer that Bush was, the fact that he refused to support Iraq was a major component in him getting elected.
So what if the Democrats had some blood in them, and had forced a government shutdown in the Senate?  Would I have been cheering?
I know I would have, at least initially.  It would have felt good to see my guys making a big fuss about how awful the Patriot Act was, and to not fund a damn dime until Bush and company told us exactly where all their intel was coming from.  It would have been a deeply unpopular move, but in retrospect it would have been the right thing – to bring the focus to the American people.  And doubtlessly, every Republican in the world would have called the Democrats terrorists (which, you know, is a term they bristle at when they’re dismantling the government and literally killing children with their holdups), and talked about how unpatriotic they all were, and I don’t doubt they would have gotten a free pass from the media.
Yet as time went on, and the costs of the shutdown became apparent – my friends out of work, the damage it’s doing to the next generation of government (remember when getting a government job meant bad pay in exchange for security? that’s gone), the hurt poor, the threat of defaulting on loans – I’m positive I would have backed off.  Because there’s two things in this:
1)  Holding our breath and shutting everything down to stop this war would be, in some ways, more costly than the war itself.
2)  Even if we could shut everything down, regrettably, 90% of the country backs this thing, and assuming the resolution had been passed to go to war, legally we’re looking at what America wants, and America should have it.
Because yeah, I disliked the Iraq war.  But despite the constant conservative whining, government is not about getting everything you wanted.  It’s about pooling resources to get some of what you wanted, making compromises for much of the rest, and enduring a couple of really odious things that are popular and may even be vital.  Yeah, you’re not thrilled about birth control being handed out on your dime; I’m not thrilled about drone strikes being handed out on mine.  But the deal with, you know, democracy is that we all vote on it.  It’s the will of the people, not the will of one person.
And there are times when the minority rights should be protected, no question.  But when all the legal hoops have been passed on multiple occasions, that’s actually what democracy is.  What you’re doing is actually the opposite of democracy, shutting down everyone’s votes until you get your way – and maybe that’s morally necessary at times, but don’t call it “Constitutional” or “Democratic” or anything like that.  It’s violating the oath and the intent of your office to try to armwrestle people into submission.
The will of the people has been expressed through the mechanisms of the people.  Now you’re exploiting loopholes and refusing to pass a clean CR bill to get your way.  If that had happened with Iraq, I probably would have been morally behind them, as I would have seen the stopping of the Iraq war as a good and just cause.  (Which, really, the post-invasion havoc, the lessening of American political power, and the drag on our economy all has only proven to be not nearly worth the cost of taking down one repugnant dictator.  It’s like burning down your house to rid yourself of a bedbug infestation.)  I would have at least appreciated the intent behind the shutdown.
Ultimately, though, I would have been against the shutdown as going too far.  Yes, we could have done it.  But we’d made our point.  We had raised the issue of the Iraq war 40 times in the Senate and had it shut down every time by the House, and at this point it’s not the House that’s the problem, it’s our refusal to do what the Democrats ultimately did in real life – say, “This is a shit sandwich, but how can we refine it so that it works as best as we can make it?”
Because no, I don’t like the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.  The way this works is not to hold my breath until I turn blue; it’s to convince people how awful this is in the next round of elections, and get enough voters on my side that the government has no choice but to transform it bit by bit into something functional.  But until then, I make these ugly laws work to the best of my ability, because my job is to keep the country running smoothly, not to punish people for poor decisions.
So I wouldn’t have.  As I don’t now.  As does most of America, and unfortunately, given that the Republicans’ avowed and open strategy is not to negotiate with Obama until he caves on Obamacare, the blame for this mess can be laid squarely at the feet of the Republicans.