calendarlive.com: Danger: pickup artists ahead

Interesting. Sean, where's the Game/No Game, Caring/No Caring VEN diagram when we need it?

calendarlive.com: Danger: pickup artists ahead: "Strauss once counted himself among those who were panicked around women. Then he overcompensated. After attending a seminar on the art of seduction in 2002, the former New York Times columnist and current Rolling Stone writer has been obsessed with, even addicted to, a little-known community of men who consider themselves pickup artists. He posts to message boards, helps out with seduction courses, even concocted an ill-conceived plan to get the best in the business to live together in Dean Martin's former mansion above the Hollywood strip.

He chronicles his ascent (descent?) into this world in the new book 'The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists,' which arrives in stores, bound like a Bible, on Tuesday. In it, Strauss describes in graphic detail a personal journey that begins with him being terrified of women and ends with him believing he could seduce any woman in a club, bar, coffee shop or elevator. He is a diminutive man with a shaved head and angular goatee, and though he seems gentle and sweet in person — nervous and cute and maybe a touch effete (affectations he's learned in seduction training, perhaps?) — in the book he comes off as debauched and predatory."