The one thing that most tuts leave out is the fluid simulator controller object. Its basicly a force field so when - it repels and when + it attracts the fluid. In a closed domain this can act as a pretty good pump too. Its used to do things like make a walking goo man that looks like he’s covered in black oil for instance. Here is a short vid showing the controller object in action.
Here is more fun with controllers!
TIPS: 1) a controller must be a SOLID object or a shell with access to the inside. This means the built in Suzanne monkey Won’t work because the eye meshes are not attached! Took me several crashes to figure this one out. You can use planes but they don’t work so hot (what do you do with the non-normal face?)
2) Second, if fluid gets inside the controller object, it can crash the simulation. A little calculation error spilling is not a problem, however, if you start with the controller dipped into the fluid, the calculations start with it full of fluid and most of the time crash the simulation. You can’t make an object both a controller and an obstacle either. Therefore start with your controller object outside of the fluid. Start the fluid simulation, then dip the controller into the fluid and let the fun begin. While this seems like a waste of bake time, its the only reliable way to go.
3) Another tip, you have to make the fluid object (the object that “is” the fluid at frame 1) about 0.5 BU smaller than the domain on all sides. Then you start the sim and this falls down and fills the domain. If its too big, the simulation will crash or simply not work.
4) to make a controller object just click on the object then physics then fluid then controller. The radius controls how far the “force field” effect of the controller reaches away from the controller surface and iirc local strength is proportional to radius cubed. Strength effect is the one I chose to control and in my experiments, there seems to be a definite threshold for strength that varies with viscosity and simulation size.
Here is a vid illustrating that you can quickly pop the strength to -1 and it will blow the fluid right off the controller (use constant mode for your f-curve points). If you leave the controller object on a layer that isn’t rendered, you could have a simulation of walking fluid man suddenly exploding. Imagine the gore you could create with successive explosions of solidified meatpuppets z-composited with red fluid sims exploding underneath, sigh, such a bit of artwork. here is my magic piece of wood again:
Hey great idea but how do I set this up. I don’t see the controller object anywhere. Is this only available in the Game Engine. Any help would be appreciated.
No it’s available in the render engine as well. It’s at the top of the list (Control) in the fluid types menu on the physics tab
Anyone know why the Controller Object’s Time only goes to frame 100. My animation lasts 300 frames. 
I think the time is actually in seconds and not frames (maybe the designers thought 100 secs was long enough)