泉ちゃんは10年以上前からバイクとロックンロール関係での付き合いだし、ほしっちは昔のご近所さんでバルカン同士ということで出会って一緒に走る仲間になったが、二人が一緒になるのはすごく意外だった。2005年の平湯ツーリングにドライブ気分で車で付き合った時もさらに驚いた。でも、考えてみるとほそっちの優しさと泉ちゃんの可愛らしさはぴったり合ってるような気もする。

本当は二人のためにもパレードをしたかったけど、残念ながら二人の事情があり今回はできなかった。でもすごく幸せそうな顔が見れて、本当によかった。（由佳ちゃんが撮った写真はこちら。）

しばらく新潟に二人は行ってしまうけど、何年後かに、ハーレーの後ろに泉ちゃんを乗せて川崎に戻ってくるのを楽しみにしてるよ！

泉＆ほそっち、末永くお幸せに！

II. Seven things I cannot do:
(1) Drink happoshu
(2) Go more than a month without watching Doctor Who
(3) Trust Mercedes-Benz and BMW drivers
(4) Do the splits (as in spreading my legs 180 degrees)
(5) Figure out the delivery amount on a long-term interest-bearing bond with a face value of 1 million yen and a unit price of 102 yen (sorry, inside joke)
(6) Dunk
(7) Surf

III. Seven things that attract me to blogging:
Sorry. First time blogger. Not qualified for this question.

IV. Seven things I say most often:
(1) “Jesus Christ!”
(2) “Absolutely”
(3) “しゃ～！“（”Shaaa!） after downing a pint
(4) “Oh yeah!”
(5) ”ええ感じや!“ (“all right!”)
(6) In my opinion…
(7) まいど！（”Hi!”）

V. Seven books that I love:
Not necessarily great books, just books I like a lot:
(1) Under the Lake by Stuart Woods
(2) Palindrome by Stuart Woods
(3) Nobel House by James Clavell
(4) Anything by H.P. Lovecraft
(5) Almost anything by Michael Crichton
(6) Pelican Brief by John Grisham
(7) Shogun by James Clavell (Although I haven’t read this since I was 16. I may find it cringe inducing now. For better or worse, this is the book that got me into Japan in the first place)

VI. Seven movies that I watch over and over again:
(1) Star Wars
(2) Mad Max
(3) In the Heat of the Night
(4) Any Doctor Who
(5) Aliens
(6) Twin Peaks
(7) Bladerunner

VII. Seven people to whom I pass the meme:
Sorry, no passing by me.

I. Seven things to do before I die:
(1) Tour America’s National Parks by motorcycle
(2) Tour Norway by motorcyle
(3) Tour New Zealand by motorcycle
(4) Dunk during an actual game, rather than just during the pregame warmup
(5) Get washboard abs, if only to be able to say that I once had washboard abs
(6) Raise my daughters to be the sort of people who make a positive difference in the world
(7) Convince as many people as possible that “meme” doesn’t just mean “something passed around the Internet” and can actually represent a really useful concept.

II. Seven things I cannot do:
(1) Shop at a normal clothing store
(2) Drive a normal-sized car
(3) Get on a train without ducking
(4) Stop talking about my size
(5) Breathe through my nose during March or April
(6) Get a suntan
(7) Control the volume of my voice after a few drinks

III. Seven things that attract me to blogging:

I’m clearly not drawn to blogging enough to actually blog, so I’m not really qualified to answer this question.

IV. Seven things I say most often:
(1) Oh Yeah!
(2) 人生は楽しくなきゃ! (Life’s gotta be fun!)
(3) あぁ、幸せ。(Life is good.)
(4) 美味い! (Delicious!)
(5) いいね! (Cool!)
(6) Yeah, but don’t you think…
(7) Of course, but…

V. Seven books that I love:
Not necessarily great books, just books I like a lot:
(1) Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein
(2) The Scar by China Mieville
(3) Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
(4) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Card is a pompous bigot, but I still like his books.)
(5) Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
(6) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
(7) Shogun by James Clavell (This was my favorite bok when I was 15, mostly good for humor value now.)

VI. Seven movies that I watch over and over again:
By choice:
(1) Lord of the Rings
(2) Star Wars (all but Episode I)

With my 3-year-old daughter, but I don’t mind as much as the other stuff she makes me watch:
(3) Spirited Away
(4) My Neighbor Totoro
(5) Kiki’s Delivery Service
(6) Finding Nemo
(7) Alladin

VII. Seven people to whom I pass the meme:
I’m going to cop out by quoting PZ’s answer to this one:

You know, if everyone has to name seven new people with each generation of this meme, there are going to be 5,764,801 articles on this subject after just 8 generations. I think it is my obligation to stop the proliferation now.

I’d like to hear the Stinger‘s answer, though.

The other day I had a long discussion with Bitch Ph.D. in the comments at Unfogged about women keeping or changing their names at marriage.
My basic argument is:
a. I parse “fist name + last name” as “individual name + family name”.
b. My concept of marriage is two individuals founding a family.
Therefore, it makes sense for all individuals of the newly-formed family to have the same last name.
The problem for me then becomes one of what that name should be. In my case, for a number of reasons, my wife chose to share the family name I was born to.

I understand that many people have different concepts of both a and b, and those people should of course be under no obligation to change their names. I am only arguing that this public expression of family unity can outweigh other concerns like not wanting to reinforce a patriachal institution.

Bitch Ph.D., whose blog I read regularly and whose opinion I respect quite a bit, was saying that women taking their husbands names was appalling. Ordinarily when someone judges my actions wihout knowledge of my cricumstances or decision processes, I either ignore them or tell them to fuck off. In this case, however, as a fan, I found it difficult to ignore that she was in effect judging my wife’s choice with no knowledge of the context of that choice. (I know her comments weren’t meant to be taken personally, but it was difficult not to react to them personally.)

We had an interesting (to me, at least) discussion about the issue, and she has many valid criticisms of the practice. I believe that they are outweighed by the argument above alone, but as this is a matter of balancing the values involved, reasonable people can disagree about this.
During the discussion I refrained from bringing up the other reasons why we chose to share my name, because I thought it would be a digression, but since some of those reasons are interesting in their own right (and because I want to get it off my chest), I thought I’d post about them here.

We are an interracial couple living in Japan, and we had to overcome a lot of racist bullshit in order to get married, so racial and cultural issues are a bit more personal and immediate to us than gender issues.
My wife gets a kick out of the fact that merely stating her name is a big publc “fuck you” to those who think she’s a race-traitor.

Keeping her parents’ name would also be seen by many as an attempt not to rock the boat, to keep her choice of a foreign husband in the closet, and to hedge her bets in case of divorce, since everyone knows those Gaijin men tend to be unfaithful.

We also felt that, given that any children we have are going to be dealing with all sorts of racial issues growing up, sharing a common family name could reduce the number of confusing identity issues to deal with.

There were also less important aesthetic issues like the cool factor of an anglo-saxon name tacked onto her common Japanese name, and that she had never liked her surname to begin with. Her surname attached to my name really didn’t scan well, so we rejected that on aesthetic grounds.
She also strongly dislikes her father, and welcomed a chance to separate herself from him symbolically.

And of course there are the reasons that are really just excuses, like the sheer volume of paperwork and bureaucratic nonsense we would have had to go through to choose another option. It is here that I have to agree with Bphd’s assertion that it’s less of a “choice” if government and society coerces it. But we had to go through bureaucratic nonsense to change her name to something that can’t be written in Chinese characters, so this wasn’t a major factor anyway.

So maybe we are failing to send a message that helps subvert the patriarchal norms of society, but I think we’re sending other powerful messages to society on other fronts. As for gender issues, I know that our openly egalitarian family structure has caused fights in more than one neighborhood household where the husband has until now expected to be waited on hand and foot.
In the context of the cultures and societies in which we live, we all sometimes have to make choices between imperfect alternatives, and I believe that we should generally withhold our judgement of others’ choices until we understand that context.