Defenestrated

White Teeth wins at TV awards

The BBC is reporting that the TV adaptation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth has won several awards at the Monte Carlo Television Festival. I've yet to see the TV series but if it's anything like the book, this is a well-deserved award.

White Teeth was Smith's first novel and it's a monumentous achievement. Aside from the depth of characterizations, the accurate representations of several decades of English society, the resonance of the plotlines and the protagonists, the book itself is a wonderful testament to Britain's multiculturalism -- its strengths, weaknesses, failures, and triumphs.

And she was 19 when she wrote it. What must it be like to be that young and gifted?

Why the Beeb is so great

The Beeb is my favorite British institution. No other nation on Earth has (to my knowledge) anything that can compare to the BBC. It broadcasts TV and radio to millions, worldwide; it operates the most extensive network of news and news journalists; it reaches a wider audience than any other broadcaster; and it does all this thanks to the British viewing and listening public.

High-speed walkway in Paris

The French are sick and tired of walking, so they've invented a fast-moving walkway (check out the neat-o animation). Actually sounds like a great idea! Aside from the fact that it moves people around faster, it'll persuade people to walk rather than drive short distances...if it can be adapted for anything other than straight-line routes.

Great Britain? Yeah, right...

So today is July 5, and I'm in America. Last night we went to see the fireworks (viewed from the top floor of a car park; less crowds) and today we're watching the Macy's and Washington Monument displays on TiVo, for the benefit of our 2 year old who adores the "flowers" as she calls 'em. This pomp and circumstance made me realized that Americans know what being American means. My dad frequently comments that "If Americans are one thing, it's patriotic," and he's absolutely right. Which leads me to the (pretty unstartling) realization that Britons aren't so proud of their citizenship. Or, at least, they don't demonstrate it.

And that strikes me as really quite sad, and unwarranted. Britain, and Britons, have a lot to be proud of. History provides many sources of national pride but many of those are (quite rightly) tarred with the egregious acts of our forefathers. All the same, achievements like these should give us some cause to celebrate British nationality:

• The English language.
  
• The British Empire (and its fall)
  
• Two World Wars. We won, in case people had forgotten.
  
• Elgar.
  
• Football (soccer).
  
• The BBC.
  

And that's a very protracted list.

However, it's easy to get caught looking backwards for sources of national pride and honour. Doing so catches us in a depressing loop: we created the Empire; to do so we were deeply unpleasant to millions of people; we rightly lost the Empire as a result. (I don't consider this an entirely accurate portrayal, by the way.) So without looking to today for our national identity and pride, we'll completely lose sight of what Britain is rather than what it was. So from hereon out I'll be highlighting many of the reasons and causes of that pride.

Telecommuting

Want to work in your slippers? Used to be that you'd need to become an independently wealthy auteur. If you don't suit a diamond-encrusted smoking jacket (and, let's face it, who does?), telecommuting's the way to rock. I've got a few links that may be useful if you're interested in learning more.

SMS from AIM and iChat

As seen on the Interesting People mail list, you can now SMS folks through AIM (and, by proxy, iChat on the Mac). Apparently you can't yet SMS non-US phones but that's bound to happen sooner or later. As it is, circumnavigating US operators' ridiculous charges for SMS is only a good thing.

Why The Fella exists

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

All the same, it seems only right to have a reason for this blog, however unreasonable I may be.

It exists because I think we need a conversation about being a fella. Seems to me that the stereotypes of bruiser or loser are irrelevant, and have been for a long time. While it would be easy (however painful) to stick to these cookie cutouts of blokedom, they insufficiently describe the spectrum of men who exist. So as we've become more aware of the colors and hues among the male population, we need to start talking about them.

I created this blog to highlight the things I find interesting, and to focus on what has become central in my life. In thinking about many of those things -- family, children -- I started wondering whether there was any place we fellas could actually converse about them. I found nothing that seemed to fit the bill and The Fella is a response to that lack.

Two reasons to be cheerful

These guys are Alec and Owen, our twin sons who were born on May 18, 2003. I'll write more about their long, hard journey to be born, and how we traveled it with them. For now, it's enough to note that these chaps will one day be fathers, too. And that these pages are for those of us in this generation who want to understand more about fatherhood, and being a bloke, a husband or a spouse in the 21st century.

What's all this?

It seems that I've managed to install this Movable Type gizmo and can henceforth inflict all manner of nonsense on anyone hardy enough to visit these pages.

The next step is to come up with a sensible idea of what and who this site will be for, beside myself and my navel-gazing. For now, let's see how a posting behaves itself.