Ferrett's Stupid Nail Tricks: The Latest Nail-Related Weirdness

“Your salon really does love finding new and interesting polishes, doesn’t it?” asked Little_ribbit.  To which my response was, “Replace ‘salon’ with ‘me.'”
Basically, if it’s new and crazy, I want it on my nails.  (Next up: Nail wraps from Espionage Cosmetics.  Nebula, Circuit Board, Steampunk, Time Lord, Zombie Killer.)

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.