DistrictGrind

Sit, Beg, Roll Over, Stay Animal trainers use lots of tricks to train their charges. Try the techniques below at home.

* Reward positive behavior: If your mate picks up just one dirty sock without being asked, give lots of praise. Or a tasty fish.
* Ignore negatives: Don ' t nag about the rest of the filthy laundry still piled on the floor. Trainers call this Least Reinforcing Scenario.
* Don ' t take it personally: Laundry is just laundry, not a symbol for how much your spouse loves you or values your marriage...
~[Newsweek]

...or so says Amy Sutherland author of "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage, " a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers' techniques to her husband's annoying habits.

Further down in the article we have, "Sutherland's husband eventually caught on to her experiment...and even started using the techniques back on her. Now they use the word "shamu" as a verb, as in "Did you just shamu me?"

This isn't cute or neat.