Coyote Blog

If you plotted my "certainty" curve over time, it probably hit a low point in high school, climbed to peaks during college and just afterwards, slid over time as my face got pressed up against the glass of the real world, and dropped even lower when I discovered RSS readers and put a wide variety of feeds into it.  That is not to say I am not confident -- at least as long as we are talking about intellectual and not social skills -- but I am more open to being wrong than I have been since I was about 18.  I am fairly sure I still greatly overestimate my own correctness.

I was thinking a while back about why I perceived myself to have had this period in high school when I was less certain of my infallibility.  One reason had to be my finally coming to terms with nagging questions about the religion I grew up with.  Another was probably due to high school debate, where after vociferously defending a policy position for an hour one immediately had to walk into another room and defend the opposite side.  Even then high school debate was becoming broken, but being forced to argue both sides of every issue was a great experience.

All this is an introduction to a nice work by Charles Chu called "The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong."  It is hard to excerpt, because it covers a lot of ground, but I wish in retrospect my high school had printed something like this on my locker door.  If I had a billion dollars and wanted to found a new university**, I would make the ideological Turing test the core of the educational philosophy.  Think of what goes on in colleges nowadays and being a professor and saying "OK, class half over.  Nice discussion.  Now everyone switch sides."***

** Name a major private university with a national reputation or that your friends' kids have considered attending that was founded after 1900.  I can come up with only a couple: Rice University in Houston and several of the Claremont Colleges (e.g. Claremont-McKenna) in California.  Only one school in the Ivy League is less than 250 years old. Most folks can perhaps name one in their local city (ie Grand Canyon University here in Phoenix) that is newer but does not have a national reputation.  I guess that it could take a while to develop a national reputation, but 100 years?  Really?  In the art school world (which aren't generally considered universities) I can name at least 4 schools with a national reputation (at least in the art world) that were founded much more recently, several in my lifetime (SCAD, Ringling, Art Center, Cal Arts).

*** I did very well at Harvard Business School, better than I have done at anything else in my life (they did not have class ranks but I was pretty damn close to #1 out of 900, after being literally the last person they let in off the waiting list).  It helped that I love the format and loved the subject matter.  Also, to be honest it helped that I could do math (which held back half the class but led to my marrying someone I was tutoring) and that English was my first language (I had great respect for foreign students who even attempted to survive the case method in a second language).  But the real trick to success was to shine in the discussions, which were 70% or so of the grade.  And I did so with a simple trick.  I watched the discussion, and jumped in on whatever side was losing or had the fewest supporters, irregardless of what I might believe.  Not only was this a ton of fun, but it was appreciated by the professors -- they did not want to intervene in a discussion but felt like they had to if the argument got too unbalanced.  I took all kinds of positions against my true beliefs.  I argued that the only mistake "neutron" Jack Welch made at GE was not firing more people.  I slammed Steinway for ignoring new technology and fetishizing hand craftsmanship.  And I convinced everyone I must hate Canada when I opened a rant on the nation with "Canada is like a whole other state," riffing off the then-current Texas travel ad that said "Texas: It's Like A Whole Other Country."  I am not sure how one would do such a thing today when comments in class are seen more as virtue-signalling to your crowd than they are thought-out policy positions, and when taking the "wrong" side, even as an intellectual exercise, can lead to nationwide social media shaming.  By the way, my keys to succeeding at HBS are embedded in my novel BMOC, currently free on Kindle.

My novel BMOC is here

My short story String Theory is here

Both are offered for free until July 31.  Grab a copy and tell you friends and family.

My novel BMOC is here

My short story String Theory is here

Both are offered for free until July 31.  Grab a copy and tell you friends and family.

Starting today, through about October 2, the Kindle electronic version will be free for both my books.   This includes my novel BMOC and my short story String Theory.

Starting tomorrow, and for a limited time, the Kindle electronic version will be free for both my books.   This includes my novel BMOC and my short story String Theory.

In honor of an anniversary of sorts for the book, I have done a substantial edit on both the printed and Kindle editions of my first novel "BMOC" and it is now on sale through Monday for the low, low price of $0.

Go and grab a copy.

In honor of an anniversary of sorts for the book, I have done a substantial edit on both the printed and Kindle editions of my first novel "BMOC" and it is now on sale through Monday for the low, low price of $0.

Go and grab a copy.

In honor of an anniversary of sorts for the book, I have done a substantial edit on both the printed and Kindle editions of my first novel "BMOC" and it is now on sale through Monday for the low, low price of $0.

Go and grab a copy.  As John Belushi says in Animal House, Don't cost nothin'

Even if you don't want it, grab a copy for free and pump up my stats so I can impress my kids.

Yes, people write that sort of headline all the time.  But in this case, I know.  In my novel BMOC, I pondered for quite a while trying to make up outrageously lame torts that ignored the true guilty parties and instead targeted deep pockets only tangentially connected to the harm or loss.  But nothing I made up, which I thought to be over the top, beats this one from reality.  Via Walter Olson, of course:

Prison inmate orders attack on guard at guard’s home in Bishopville, South Carolina. Surviving guard Robert Johnson and wife “did not, however, sue the typical defendants – i.e., the shooter or any prison inmate or employee. Rather, the Johnsons sued several cellular phone service providers and owners of cell phone towers.

Why?  Because they have the most money of anyone involved.  Of course, that is not the logic in the legal briefs.  Apparently, gasp, the criminals made use of cell phones to plan the crime and for some odd reason the cell phone companies were not monitoring every second of every single call on their networks and failed to prevent the crime.

When I first offered my novel BMOC to readers, a lot of them assumed it was some libertarianish fantasy.  Actually, its not a particularly serious book, just your normal everyday mystery for reading at the beach.  The unique part of the book is the introduction of a number of oddball business models (I used to make these up as my occupation to share with people at cocktail parties when I got bored).

I am in the midst of a light edit of the book for a re-release  (like my last story, we will have a limited time free-on-Kindle promotion, so watch for that).  Anyway, I had forgotten this idea I had included for a reality TV show.  I think it holds up pretty well.

Gladstone knew that most of Cupcake’s best-known work was in a reality TV show called “Seven Deadly Sins.”  In that particular show, eight priests were brought together, tempted each week by one of the seven deadly sins. The viewing audience got to vote each week as to which priest succumbed the most and got kicked off the show. Cupcake was featured prominently in several of the weekly contests, including her now famous take-down of Father Stanley Vincenzo (who had up to that point been considered the shoe-in favorite to emerge victorious) in the “lust” episode.

It is amazing no sharp TV executive has yet snapped this idea up.  You are all welcome to it, go and make your fortune.

My new short story "String Theory" is free for another 24 hours.  After that, you will have to sell some of your gold bullion and pony up $0.99.  By waiting until the last minute, you get the advantage of obtaining an updated version of the story without a typo on page one (yes, a leopard does not really change his spots in a different medium).

You can get it on Kindle here.

And my novel BMOC is still available on Kindle and as an actual dead-tree book.

My latest short story is listed at $0.99 on Kindle (the cheapest one can list something for) but is available for free through December 24.  It's called String Theory and is the result of a fun discussion my daughter and I had combined with a long, boring airplane ride.

And my novel BMOC is still available on Kindle and as an actual dead-tree book. [link fixed]

I keep saying the new novel is coming soon, but it is coming soon if I can get my act together and polish a few things.

Update:  #16 #2 for Kindle reads under 45 minutes in the Science Fiction & Fantasy section.  LOL.  If we could just segment it a bit finer, I might make #1.

Apparently, a company named "Sumpto" has adopted a business model right out of my novel BMOC (written about 7 years ago).  This is a scene where entrepreneur Preston Marsh is interviewing and trying to recruit the protagonist Susan out of business school.  They are discussing the business model of his company called BMOC.  Half of its business model was that companies paid BMOC to place their products in the hands of influential high school students.

[Marsh:] The real innovation, though is… do you know what a product placement is?”

[Susan:] “Sure. It’s when a company pays to get their product into a TV show or movie – like when Reese’s pieces were used in the movie ET or I guess if you showed Seabiscuit eating Purina Horse Chow.”

“Exactly! And product placements are particularly effective. They act like an ad but they can’t be ignored like an ad. Anyway, we have taken product placements one step further: We get paid by major manufacturers to place their products not in movies but in the hands of the most popular kids in high school, the ones who really lead opinion as to what’s cool and not cool who we…”

“Who you happen to have on retainer anyway.”

“Exactly. But be careful how you think about ‘on retainer.’ The natural reaction is to assume this means money, but in our case it’s not. We keep the most popular people on retainer merely by …”

“Giving them free products,” Susan interrupted again, with growing excitement, “that manufacturers are already paying you to put in their hands.”

This is from Sumpto's web site.  (You will have to click through, for some reason even copying it as text is crashing my site, not sure why).

I had a nice Instalanche this morning on my post about the 99-cent price point on the Amazon Kindle for my book BMOC.  I also got a bit of attention at the KindleBoards forum.  So my book is nosing into the top 500 on Kindle, but until my kid noticed I did not see the other topical rankings:

LOL, #1 in Books>Entertainment>Humor>Laywers.  #2 on the same but for business.  Whole new niches beckon!  (Actually, these categories kind of make sense, though I am not sure who chose them --  I am not sure I did).

For the second straight day, I have sold fifty copies of BMOC, for a total of a hundred in two days, at 99-cents.  Fifty copies is more than I was selling in several weeks at the old price.  Thanks to Glen Reynolds for linking the idea.

Well, it may only be a short-term kick driven by you fine readers  (my thanks) but yesterday in the first day at the 99-cent price point I sold fifty copies of BMOC and jumped to number 2067 in the sales rank.  Since my main goal is to be read, rather than make money, this is great.

My novel BMOC is now $0.99 at Amazon.  With my second book coming out sometime soon (I hope) I thought I would experiment with online pricing models.  I sold about 30 a month at the old price, but Glen Reynolds linked an article praising the 99-cent Kindle price point.  So what the heck, let's try it.  My loss is your gain, as the ads say.

Reasons you might like the novel:

• It's a sort of combination of Harvard Business School case study and murder mystery, with some humor thrown in
• The business at the center of the novel is actually the good guy (err gal, I guess, since the protagonist is female). While sympathetic to capitalism, the book is primarily a light crime novel, not some sort of Randian morality tale.
• The villains include a media mogul, a tort lawyer, a local news anchor, and a US Senator  -- just like life!
• Several of the business models were made up on the fly when I attended boring cocktail parties and entertained myself creating whimsical businesses for myself.  Since that time, readers of the book have emailed me with news stories of recent startup companies following almost identical strategies.
• 4-stars at Amazon

This is probably the first ever inside reference to my novel. The funny part is that when I read TJIC's post, I thought "hmm, Preston Marsh, where have I heard that name?"  LOL.  By the way, the business idea Travis has is actually intriguing

Restaurants get napkins and linens as a service "“ every day, they trade huge bags of dirty whites for clean whites. They are in the business of cooking food and hiring wait staff, not in the business of knowing how to bleach things (or in the business of picking out linens that can stand up to bleach).

So what does clothing as a service entail? It could include cleaning, sizing, rotating wardrobes as fashions change, etc.

It removes some hassles, and bundles responsibilities in the place where there are economies of scale "“ people in the fashion industry can and will know more about sizing, cleaning, coordinating, etc. than consumers.

I and others have thoughts on the model in the comments.

By the way, for those who have not read my book, Preston Marsh is an entrepreneur who has made money in a series of sortof odd business models.  Years ago I used to get bored at parties (actually, I still get bored at parties but I no longer use this entertainment technique) and make up occupations for myself.  I remember convincing one woman who had recent evidence that I could not ski well that I was on the Olympic Ski Jumping Team  ("You don't have to turn in ski jumping!")

Anyway, all the business models in the books are ones I made up for myself on the fly at parties.  One involves building fountains in malls and then recouping the investment by harvesting coins from them.  Another, which is central to the book, is a sort of guerrilla marketing startup which does some lifestyle consulting with teens but makes its money placing products in the hands of the coolest, trendsetting teens at high schools (a model that has since been emulated by a couple of real-life companies).

By the way, the book is still on sale at Amazon and available on the Kindle for download.  Just search "BMOC."

My first novel, "BMOC," is now on Kindle for $4.99, a substantial discount off the  $17.95 price Amazon has for the dead tree version.  Incredibly, my author royalty is WAY more for the Kindle version even at that price than for the paper version.

Anyway, if you like this site, you might check it out.  The novel is part murder mystery, party comedy, and part business book.   I used to have fun with my friends at business school and later in nconsulting thinking up odd new business models (e.g. coin harvesting from fountains) and this book embodies some of the odder ones we came up with.  Though as wacky as the business model of the main company in the book (called "BMOC" appropriately enough) was supposed to be, since writing it I have had a number of people send me stories of startups pursuing eerily similar approaches to marketing.  Anyway, the book is a light read though with adult language and a tiny bit of sex.

A portion of my novel BMOC was satire of oddball lawsuits.  In that book, for example, I had a woman suing Disney because she found that the characters at Disney World were people in costumes rather than the actual animated characters she had expected.  I thought that was enough beyond reason and reality to constitute satire, but I guess I was wrong:

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased "Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries" because she believed "crunchberries" were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said "berries" were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

Via Overlawyered:

How "safety" news gets shaped: a litigation consultant "at the request of trial lawyers "¦ combed through hundreds of coroner's reports and media accounts" and before long ABC had an alarming story to run.

There is a symbiosis between tort lawyers (who want to inflame a jury into giving large awards, or better yet create a mass tort), the media (who want scare stories to boost circulation) and government (populated with legislators just itching to ban or regulate something to show they "care").  Someone should write a book about that.

Have I ever told you that I really like author John Scalzi?  Not just because I love his books, but I do really enjoy his work.  I like him because he spends a lot of time promoting the work of other young writers and promoting the science fiction and fantasy genre in general.

Recently, Scalzi published on his blog all his Amazon one-star reviews.  As a fairly novice writer who will never write as well as Scalzi, I found this quite liberating.  If folks like him endure these bad reviews, maybe I should not let my own setbacks get me down.  He has challenged other authors to do the same, publishing their Amazon one-star reviews online.  In this post, he links a number of authors who have taken up the challenge, including Charles Stross and Jo Walton.

So, though I am not in the league of these other authors, I will post my one-star review for my book BMOC.

I like the concept for the book and like reading Warren Meyer's Coyote
Blog. I don't understand how crude and uncouth became popular and I am
disappointed that is the approach that was chosen with this book. I
should have paid attention to the review by "Warren's mother." I've
returned my copy to Amazon for a refund.

Wow, I actually feel better.  Based on this review, I will warn you as I warn my friends when I give them a copy:  The book has its crude parts, and I have only let my kids read highly edited portions.  That being said, its not Fear of Flying either, and my parent's priest read it without spontaneously combusting.  But don't buy it if you are turned off by harsh language and some sexual humor.  I have two youth novels in the works, you can save your money for them ;=)

Postscript:  This is one of the one-star reviews posted for Anya Bast's Witch Fire:

"Not romance, not erotica, basically porn - what little plot there is
exists to connect the sex scenes, note I didn't say love making scenes.
Altogether distasteful and I won't waste money on this author again."

LOL, if the review is trying to hurt Ms. Bast's sales, I am not positive this is the right approach.

Excerpt from my novel BMOC that I posted hours after the Spitzer revelations:

Taking a deep
breath, Givens said, "Senator, there is a reason that this one is not
going
away. I will spell it out: S-E-X. The press doesn't give a shit about a
few billion dollars of waste. No one tunes in to the evening news if
the
teaser is "˜Government pays too much for a bridge, news at eleven.' The
Today Show doesn't interview the
contractors benefiting from a useless bridge."

"However, everybody
and his dog will tune in if
the teaser is "˜Your tax dollars are funding call girls, film at
eleven'. Jesus, do you really think the CBS Evening
News is going to turn down a chance to put hookers on the evening news?
Not just tonight but day after day? Just watch "“ Dan Rather will be
interviewing
hookers and Chris Mathews will be interviewing hookers and for God's
sakes
Barbara Walters will probably have a weepy interview with a hooker."

OK, I missed it by that much.  It is Diane Sawyer, not Barbara Walters.

At least one good thing has come out of Eliot Spitzer's fall from
grace: Diane Sawyer will finally get to air her hooker special!

Almost two years ago, Sawyer and producers at "Prime Time Live" set
out to do a story on prostitution. Wanting to examine Nevada's legal
brothels, she headed out to the famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch.

"She really hit it off with all my girls," Bunny Ranch head Dennis
Hof tells us. "We even gave her one of the terry-cloth bathrobes they
wear. We had it embroidered, "Diane: Trainee."

My novel BMOC included an incompetent and power-abusing Senator who managed to remain a darling of the press as long as he focused his attention on pork-barrel spending and using government power to help and hurt his friends and enemies.  However, the press finally turned on him when it became known he was involved with prostitutes.  The fairly cynical (if not realistic) moral was that it was fine to abuse government power, just don't get caught in a sex scandal.

Well, it seems that we will get to test that notion in real life.  Apparently, NY governor Eliot Spitzer has been dallying with prostitutes.  Now, I couldn't really care less about his purchase of sex -- I have argued many times for legalization of prostitution.  But it will be an interesting test of my book's cynical hypothesis, since to date the press has been in love with Spitzer despite (even because of) his abusive practices as AG and governor.  The radio news a few minutes ago actually said "Mr. Spitzer, who to date has had a squeaky clean reputation..."  Huh?  Only if you read the fawning PR work done for him by the NY Times in the past.

Update: Here is the passage from the book.  Sound familiar?

Taking a deep
breath, Givens said, "Senator, there is a reason that this one is not going
away. I will spell it out: S-E-X. The press doesn't give a shit about a few billion dollars of waste. No one tunes in to the evening news if the
teaser is "˜Government pays too much for a bridge, news at eleven.' The Today Show doesn't interview the
contractors benefiting from a useless bridge."

"However, everybody and his dog will tune in if
the teaser is "˜Your tax dollars are funding call girls, film at eleven'. Jesus, do you really think the CBS Evening
News is going to turn down a chance to put hookers on the evening news? Not just tonight but day after day? Just watch "“ Dan Rather will be interviewing
hookers and Chris Mathews will be interviewing hookers and for God's sakes
Barbara Walters will probably have a weepy interview with a hooker."....

"You guys in the Senate can get away with a lot,
as long as long as a) you don't get caught or b) the scandal is so boring or
complex that it won't sell newspapers. Hell, I saw a poll the other day that a substantial percentage of
Americans to this day don't understand or even believe what Richard Nixon did
was wrong. But if you polled those same
people, every freaking one of them would say that they knew and believed that
Bill Clinton got [had sex with] an intern.

Update #2: Disclosure -- I did not like Spitzer, even at Princeton.  This, however, was not uncommon.  In fact, Spitzer managed to inspire a jihad in response to his governance of the student council there.

Update #3:  ROFL!  I got this email from a reader:

I eagerly await your
comments on the latest imbroglio involving your favorite Princeton
classmate.  Please don't take the high road.

It seems I may not be the only person who does not care for Mr. Spitzer.

Update #4:  I hope the girls paid sales taxes on their transactions and have all their payroll taxes in order.  Certainly Mr. Spitzer has established the principle that illegal businesses still owe taxes.

That seems to be the axiom in New York these days, where Gov. Eliot L.
Spitzer (D), struggling to close a $4.4 billion budget gap, has
proposed making drug dealers pay tax on their stashes of illegal drugs.
The new tax would apply to cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and could be
paid with pre-bought "tax stamps" affixed to the bags of dope.

Update #5:  Libertarians like myself will point out that this is all between consenting adults.  Of course, that did not stop Eliot Spitzer from trying to prosecute Dick Grasso for a pay package that was approved by consenting (and quite sophisticated) adults.

Update #6: It is being reported that Spitzer will resign.  QED folks.  Spitzer uses the state police to spy on political rivals and the press continues to call him a squeaky clean reformer.  But pay for sex with a consenting adult, and your gone. 

Update #7:  Tom Kirkendal has been all over Spitzer for years.  He writes:

But I hope that the most important lesson that
Spitzer's political career teaches us is not lost amidst the glare of a
tawdry sex scandal. As with Rudy Giuliani
before him, Spitzer rose to political power through the misuse of the
state's overwhelming prosecutorial power to regulate business
interests. In so doing, Spitzer manipulated an all-too-accommodating
mainstream media, which never misses an opportunity to take down an
easy target such as a wealthy businessperson. Spitzer is now learning
that the same media dynamic applies to powerful politicians, as well. 

However, as noted earlier here,
where was the mainstream media's scrutiny when Spitzer was destroying
wealth, jobs and careers while threatening to go Arthur Andersen on
American Insurance Group and other companies? Where was the healthy
skepticism of the unrestrained use of the state's prosecutorial power
to regulate business where business had no available regulatory
procedure with which to contest Spitzer's actions?

I have not been able to read a Grisham lawyer novel since "the Runaway Jury,"  which was an absolutely amazing ode to the joys of jury tampering.  Seldom does one see an author treat so many abuses of due process and individual rights so lovingly, all because it is OK to take away a defendant's right to a fair trial as long as the defendant is an out-of-favor corporation.  (On the other hand, Grisham's "the Painted House," about growing up on a small cotton farm in the south, is wonderful).

Grisham's biases in the Runaway Jury become clearer to me now that I now he pals with Dickie Scruggs, notorious Mississippi tort lawyer who is soon to be sharing a cell next to Jeff Skilling, that is unless they can delay his investigation until Jon Edwards is attorney general.

Anyway, it seems Grisham may be up for the bad timing award:

With what might seem like startlingly bad timing, Scruggs chum/novelist (and campaign donation co-bundler,
if that's the right term) John Grisham is just out with a new fiction
entitled The Appeal, whose thesis, to judge by Janet Maslin's oddly favorable review in the Times,
is that the real problem with the Mississippi judicial system is that
salt-of-the-earth plaintiff's lawyers are hopelessly outgunned in the
task of trying to get friendly figures elected to judgeships to sustain
the large jury verdicts they win. One wonders whether any of Maslin's
editors warned her about recent news events -- she doesn't seem aware
of them -- that suggest that the direst immediate problems of the
Mississippi judiciary might not relate to populist plaintiff's lawyers'
being unfairly shut out of influence. Of course it's possible she's not
accurately conveying the moral of Grisham's book, and if so I'm not
likely to be the first to find out about it, since I've never succeeded
in reading more than a few pages of that popular author's work. By the
way, if you're wondering which character in the novel Grisham presents
as the "hothead with a massive ego who hated to lose," yep, it's the
out-of-state defendant.

If you would prefer a novel that make villains of tort lawyers and treats Mississippi as a trial-lawyer run legal hellhole, my novel BMOC is still on sale (and actually selling pretty steadily) at Amazon.