Take all dirty dishes to the kitchen sink before going to bed each night.
Place all dirty laundry down the chute before going to bed each night.
Ensure all dirty laundry is right-side-out and, if necessary, spot treated.
Do not use upholstery or bedding as a tissue. Boogers & snot do not belong on the arms of the sofa.
Do not use upholstery or bedding as a napkin. Wipe greasy fingers on a napkin or even on shirt! (See above re spot treating.)
DON'T SPILL STUFF.
Don't create environments ripe for spilling stuff.
If stuff is spilled, fetch someone who knows what the hell they're doing to aid in its clean-up IMMEDIATELY.
Wipe the kitchen counter (and NOT onto the floor, either) after preparing food.
Turn off lights & televisions when last person leaving a room.
Learn how to thoroughly wipe your ass (without clogging the commode). No one wants their clothing laundered with underwear that look as if they were used as toilet tissue. It's just fucking gross.
REPLACE THE TOILET TISSUE if you use the last of the roll. (Don't know where it is? ASK! It's NOT hidden, and it's not a secret.)
If you make a mess, CLEAN IT UP! Leaving it for someone else is inconsiderate and rude, no matter how old you are. Period.

When a Jewish boy turns 13, he heads to a temple for a deeply
meaningful rite of passage, his bar mitzvah. When a Catholic girl
reaches about the same age, she stands in front of the local bishop,
who touches her forehead with holy oil as she is confirmed into a
2,000-year-old faith tradition. But missing altogether in each of those
cases — and in countless others of equal religious importance — is any
role at all for government. There is no baptism certificate issued by
the local courthouse, and no federal tax benefits attached to the
confessional booth, the into-the-water-and-out born-again ceremony or
any of the other sacraments that believers hold sacred.

Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some
legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned. Two law
professors from Pepperdine University issued a call to re-examine the
role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in
the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors — one of who voted for
and one against Prop 8, which successfully ended gay marriage in
California — say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over
gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government
altogether. (See pictures of the busiest wedding day in history.)

Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a
certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" —
anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word
marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the
church, where they could bless their union with all the religious
ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its
role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with
its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage
is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be
all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in
federal law, for "married" couples.

"While new terminology for all may at first seem awkward — mostly in
greeting-card shops — [it] dovetails with the court's important
responsibility to reaffirm the unfettered freedom of all faiths to
extend the nomenclature of marriage as their traditions allow," wrote
professors Douglas W. Kmiec and Shelley Ross Saxer. Kmiec voted for
Prop 8 because of the teachings of his Catholic Church and his notion
of religious liberty, but has since said he believes the Court should
not allow one group of Californians to marry while denying the
privilege to others.

Their idea got a big boost three days later, during the March 5 oral
arguments before the California Supreme Court, which is expected to
issue a ruling soon in the case brought by gay couples and others who
argue the constitutional amendment passed by voters last fall is
invalid. Justice Ming Chin asked attorneys for each side whether the
idea would solve the legal issues connected to gay marriage — issues
that at their core revolve around the question of whether some couples
could marry but not others violates constitutional guarantees of equal
protection under the law.

Both sets of lawyers agreed that the idea would resolve the equal
protection issue. Take the state out of the marriage business, and then
both kinds of couples — straight and gay — would be treated the same.
Even Ken Starr, the Pepperdine law dean and former Whitewater
independent counsel who argued in favor of Prop 8, agreed that the idea
would solve the legal issues, though he said it was a solution that
lies outside the legal authority of the court. An attorney for the
other side, Michael Maroko, didn't expressly endorse the idea, but he
told Chin, "If you're in the marriage business, do it equally. And if
you're not going to do it equally, get out of the business."

The two Pepperdine professors are arguing that the Court use that
line of thinking in crafting its decision in the case before it,
short-circuiting the need for a new referendum. Their proposal is aimed
at helping speed a resolution on the issue in other states — where gay
marriage is heating up in Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont and elsewhere —
and on the federal level. All sides on the debate expect the issues
bubbling up out of the state courts and legislatures to eventually gain
traction in federal courts, too, ultimately leading to a case before
the Supreme Court or efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution, or both.

But as Solomonic as the compromise seems, giving up the word
"marriage" may be impossible. For many couples who have already joined
in matrimony, the idea of the state no longer calling them "married"
may seem as if something important has been taken away — even if it's
hard to define just what it is that's been lost. And for many others —
the folks who feel most strongly about marriage, and who most
passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage —
the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They aren't just
against gay marriage, they are against gay couples — and especially
against government sanctioning those relationships, no matter what they
are called.

And as Justice Chin considers whether he can craft a compromise with
his fellow justices that would both uphold Prop 8 — and therefore the
right of the people to amend the state constitution — and assert the
right of gay people to be treated equally, he may find that the folks
who cling hardest to the word "marriage" are the gay couples
themselves. After all, what was the most sweeping part of the May 2008
decision Ming and his colleagues issued granting gays the right to
marry? It was the idea that the word "marriage" itself is so strong
that denying it to gay couples violates the most sacred rights
enshrined in the state constitution, the right for all people to be
treated with dignity and fairness. Just 10 months later, gay couples —
whether they are among the 18,000 who married in the state before Prop
8 stopped the ceremonies or not — are loath to lose a word for which so
many fought so hard and so long to have apply to themselves.

http://www.king-cart.com/Phaze/product=Sapphistocated/exact_match=exact

Four rising stars of women's erotica come together in this sometimes funny, sometimes heartwarming, and totally engaging collection of stories about women who love women.

"Double Decker" by Alessia Brio: Tess is determined to win the big Karaoke contest at the Double Decker bar, and the heart of the woman organizing it. Will her evening end on a high note?

"I Know What I Want" by Jolie du Pre: Allie is an up and coming model who catches the eye of a wealthy, dominating woman. While the attentions and money from "special" modeling sessions are great, Allie wants more...but how much is enough?

"Better With Age" by Beth Wylde: After nearly twenty years, Olivia runs into her first love, Aleesha. While time seems to fade as they reunite, Olivia isn't sure passion could possibly have survived. It takes a surprising discovery at home to convince her to find out for certain if she's gotten better with age.

"Drawn" by Yeva Wiest: Manga artist Sydney loves 'em thin and leaves 'em shortly afterward, so why is she obsessing over the big, beautiful daughter of her publisher? As her Yuri artwork torments her and friends advise her, Sydney struggles with these new feelings and learns that where love and passion are concerned, she doesn't have to draw the line at any particular size.

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

There are a finite number of ways that human bodies can be placed together sexually, and as one pornography industry veteran lamented to me at the annual trade show, "they've all been shot." He sighed, pondering the challenge of creating a sexually explicit film that is unique, and mused, "After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?"

His question was offered rhetorically, but I asked: How many?

Probably four, he said; simultaneous oral, vaginal, and double-anal penetration was realistic. Another producer later in the day told me he had once worked on a film that included a double-anal/double-vag scene -- a woman being penetrated by four men at once. He said the director had a special harness made to hold the woman for that scene. In contemporary mass-marketed heterosexual pornography, it's unexceptional to see a standard DP (industry slang for "double penetration," with two men entering a woman vaginally and anally at the same time) with oral penetration.

Whatever the number, theoretical or routine, the discussion reminds us that pornography is relentlessly intense, pushing our sexual boundaries both physically and psychically. And, pornography also is incredibly repetitive and boring.

Pornographers know all this, of course, and it keeps them on edge.

These days there are about 13,000 pornographic films released each year, compared with about 600 from Hollywood. Not surprisingly, a common concern at the Adult Entertainment Expo each time I attended (in 2005, 2006, and 2008) was that the desperate struggle by directors to distinguish their films from all the others was leading to a kind of "sexual gymnastics." Lexington Steele, one of the most successful contemporary pornography performers and producers, put it bluntly: "A lot of gonzo is becoming circus acts."

"Gonzo" is the pornographic genre that rejects plot, character, or dialogue, offering straightforward explicit sex. Gonzo films are distinguished from "features," which to some degree mimic the structure of a traditional Hollywood film. According to the top trade magazine: "Gonzo, non-feature fare is the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it's less expensive to produce than plot-oriented features, but just as importantly, is the fare of choice for the solo stroking consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get off on the good stuff, then, if they really wanna catch some acting, plot and dialog, pop in the latest Netflix disc." ["The Directors," Adult Video News, August 2005, p. 54.]

In that description is considerable insight into why pornography (1) has always been boring and (2) will continue to become more brutal.

The industry works from the assumption that the men who consume the vast majority of commercial heterosexual pornography are not really human beings with hearts, minds and souls. In the porn world, a man is a kind of sexual robot in search of nothing more than the stimulation of pleasure circuits. In that world, the goal is to reduce human sexuality to the production of an erection and orgasm as quickly as possible -- get it up and get it off, efficiently. Pornography assumes not that a man has a penis but that a man is nothing more than a penis.

The pornographer faces one serious obstacle in all this: Men are human beings. No matter how emotionally deformed by the toxic conception of masculinity that is dominant in a patriarchal culture such as the United States, we are human beings with hearts, minds and souls.

No matter how much men try to cut themselves off from the emotional component of sex, that component never withers completely, and therein lies the potential problem for pornographers. When all emotion is drained from sex it becomes repetitive and uninteresting -- in a word, boring, even to men who are watching solely to facilitate masturbation. Because the novelty of seeing sex on the screen eventually wears off, pornographers who want to expand (or even just maintain) market share and profit need to give their products an emotional edge of some kind.

But pornography doesn't draw on the emotions most commonly connected with sex -- love and affection -- because men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection. So, the pornographers offer men sexual gymnastics and circus acts that are saturated with cruelty toward women; they sexualize the degradation of women. While most of us would agree those are negative emotions, they are powerful emotions. And in a patriarchal society in which men are conditioned to see themselves as dominant over women, such cruelty and degradation fit easily into men's notions about sex and gender.

When I offer this critique to men who are avid consumers of pornography, they often tell me that I'm wrong, that they watch gonzo and don't see the kind of cruelty and degradation that I am describing. They tell me that that there's no cruelty in a woman is being penetrated in aggressive fashion by three men who call her a whore throughout the sex. They tell me that when five men thrust into a woman's mouth to the point she gags, slap a woman in the face with their penises, and ejaculate into her mouth and demand that she swallow it all, there's no degradation.

In some sense, they are telling the truth -- they aren't seeing the cruelty and degradation because they are too caught up in the sexual arousal, and in such a state their critical faculties are derailed. They don't see it because they are men in a patriarchal culture focused on their own pleasure. To see the woman as a person deserving of respect -- to see her as fully human -- would interfere with getting it up and getting it off.

When I was a young adult who used pornography, I didn't see it either, because I had a stake in not seeing it. That's why after an orgasm I would quickly leave the theater or adult bookstore. That dates me, I know; my pornography use came before the VCR brought pornographic films into the home. But the pattern endures; many men I talk to today tell me that after masturbating they quickly take out the DVD or shut off the computer to avoid really seeing what is taking place on the screen. To slightly revise a cultural clich, when the little head's work is done, the big head re-engages. When the sexual experience is over, men can think, and when men can see the reality of pornography's contempt for women most don't want to watch.

These are general observations, an attempt to identify patterns in pornography. But the world is, of course, complex. There is considerable individual variation in the human species; not all men watch pornography for the same reason or have the same experience. And among those 13,000 films each year, there is variety. But there is a pattern to men's consumption of pornography and the industry's strategy to keep men consuming:

* Heterosexual men tend to consume pornography to achieve sexual satisfaction without the complications of dealing with a real woman. * Pornographers deliver graphic sexually explicit material that does the job, but to do so they must continuously increase the cruelty and degradation to maintain profits.

Gonzo producers test the limits with new practices that eroticize men's domination of women. Less intense forms of those sexual practices migrate into the tamer feature pornography, and from there in muted form into mainstream pop culture. Pornography gets more openly misogynist, and pop culture becomes more pornographic -- many Hollywood movies and cable TV shows today look much like soft-core pornography of a few decades ago, and the common objectification of women in advertising has become more overtly sexualized.

Where will all this lead? How far will pornographers go to ensure their profits, especially as the proliferation of free pornography on the internet adds a new competition? How much eroticized misogyny will the culture be willing to tolerate?

When I ask that question of pornography producers, most say they don't know. An industry leader such as Lexington Steele acknowledged he has no crystal ball: "Gonzo really always pushes the envelope. The thing about it is, there's only but so many holes, only but so many different types of penetration that can be executed upon a woman. So it's really hard to say what's next within gonzo."

What's next? What comes after DPs and double anals? What is beyond a "10 Man Cum Slam" and "50 Guy Cream Pie"? I can't claim to know either. But after 20 years of researching the pornography industry as a scholar and critiquing it as part of the feminist anti-pornography movement, I know that we should be concerned. We should be afraid that there may be no limit on men's cruelty toward women. In a patriarchal society driven by the predatory values of capitalism, we should be very afraid.

"This is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world," Palin said. "This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

If Palin is going to say this, it is now perfectly legitimate to point out that she repeatedly courted a secessionist group founded by someone who openly professed hatred of the American government, cursed our flag, and wanted to secede from the Union. Sarah's husband, Todd Palin, was a member of this group, which continues to venerate that founder to this day, for years.

As you already know, the group is the Alaska Independence Party, which sees as its ultimate goal seceding from the union. Todd was a member, with a brief exception, from 1995 until 2002, according to the Division of Elections in Alaska.

And though Sarah Palin herself was apparently not a member of this group, there's no doubt that she repeatedly courted this secessionist organization over the years. In 1994, Palin attended the group's annual convention, according to witnesses who spoke to ABC News' Jake Tapper. The McCain campaign has confirmed she visited the group's 2000 convention, and she addressed its convention this year, as an incumbent governor whose oath of office includes upholding the Constitution of the United States.