Marriage-induced name changes! Everyone's blogging about it, so allow me to briefly chime in with my brilliant, completely foolproof solution to the problem. First, everyone keeps their name when they get married. That seems kind of obvious. Second, male children take the father's last name and female children take the mother's last name.

In this way each parent gets to preserve their family name, giving it to offspring of the gender that said parent secretly believes to rule (at least relative to the inescapable truth that the other sex droolz). Yet nobody has to mess around with hyphens! And, as an added bonus, if the practice ever became popular we'd soon have distinctly female and distinctly male surnames, which I think would be sort of neat.

More practically, of course, less-than-total adoption means that this would disadvantage female names. But that's all the more reason to embrace and fiercely espouse my crackpot idea immediately!

WHOOPS: How heteronormative of me! Obviously this wouldn't work for same-sex couples. In that case, I suggest alternating kid-by-kid, with first dibs going to the winner of an American Gladiators-style obstacle course. Or, failing that, rock-paper-scissors (3 out of 5).