What Shamu Taught Me...

The NYTimes online has a great feature, one of those miracles of the online age - a listing of the ten most e-mailed NYTimes articles for the day. The top ten of article popularity. It's the first thing I read after the headlines.

Normally, articles remain on the top ten for a day or two. The rare exception will stay on for three days. I think four days is the maximum I'd ever seen. But the current selection has an article that, as far as I can tell, has beaten all records. It's been on for almost two weeks (!!!), and it's still #1. It's called "What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage".

Since it's a bit long, I'll try to summarize. Basically, it essence is that if your husband (or wife) is driving you crazy with their behaviour, just take some guidance from animal training: Ignore bad behaviour, and encourage greatly praise good behaviour.

How big an insight is that? Seems to me that used to be included in child-rearing 101 manuals. But something in this particular article seems to have hit the bull's-eye of the current Zeitgeist. Go figure...