mark harmon was in the delivery room

kelly admitted to me the other day that she has this fondness for mark harmon. okay, not so much mark harmon, but for his CBS tv series NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service). for those of you not familiar with the show it’s one of the many new forensics investigation shows capitalizing on the success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. why NCIS? well, if you do the math, it turns out that this tv show was on the television while kelly was in active labor at the time. labor that involves the kind of pain no man could fathom, let alone survive. did i mention the shouting of expletives unheard outside a delivery room. so the dreamy image of mark harmon drinking coffee over decaying corpses is burned into the mind of the mother of my child. isn’t there something wrong with this? shouldn’t that brand be of my image? after all i’m the one who was being cursed at every five minutes. the show is okay. some interesting characters and storylines, but come on. the result of all of this is that we now do not answer the phone on tuesday evenings between 7-8pm. it’s a moment shared by kelly, jack and mark.

the mind works in strange ways. this televisual mnemonic of a group of naval investigators will forever be a reminder of the time and place in our history of the day jack was born. i suppose it could of been worse. CSI: Miami could have been on.

born into it

jack’s been a little cranky this morning and that can mean only thing. yes. he watched his first red sox game, a loss to the yankees, last night. okay, so he didn’t as much watch as he was present in the room. regardless he’s feeling the pain of not only losing to the “evil empire,” but also the pain of never having witnessed a red sox world series victory. hopefully by the time he’s 35 he’ll have that wonderous feeling that many of us had this past autumn. through no fault of his own jack has been born into it. born into the family history of red sox fans.

all though jack doesn’t say much these days i could tell he had questions about last night’s game. david wells? david wells? you mean that 41 year old pitcher who’s obsessed with babe ruth? what the hell was he doing on the mound for the opening game against the yankees? what kind of crazy psychological warfare is francona trying to use now? as much as i hate the yankees they’re still, dare i say it, a great team. did francona think that having the yankees face one of their former pitchers would provide the sox with some psychological edge? another question jack seemed to ask with that staring-at-shadows-on-the-wall look, was about the overall game itself. was that a spring training game? a balk!, halama doing his best buckner impression, and manny playing his usual brand of goofy lackadaisical left field. oh wait that would be a sign of the regular season.

enough about that. we just signed up for the mlb comcast package so we can enjoy watching all the sox games this season out here in sunny colorado. jack will have plenty of games to critique. more importantly i got to sit on the couch and watch a baseball game with my son. ultimately what makes a red sox fan a true fan is the love of the game, unlike a yankee fan who’s love of winning is the only aspect of the game that drives them to the ballpark. i look forward to actually taking jack to a game, especially at fenway park, and cheering on those loveable bunch of idiots or cowboys or whatever they call themselves in the coming years. jack and the next generation of red sox nation will have a different relationship with the team than i did though. i grew up admiring jim rice, fred lynn, butch hobson (player not coach), and dwight evans. with free agency, inflated salaries, and the need to buy championships jack may never become attached to certain players as my friends and i did in the 70’s and 80’s. and that is unfortunate for the fans of his generation.

maybe seinfeld was right. we are just rooting for the uniforms!

let the blogging begin

i know this first posting is on april 1, but this is no joke. my six week old son has his very own blog.

welcome to jack’s blog (web log). hopefully, if i actually keep this updated, you’ll come to know jack through the late-night nonsensical writings of his parents. so why a blog? 1.) i’ve tried the pen & paper versions in the past and that only lasted a few weeks. 2.) it’s the latest hot web-related item. yes. i’ve jumped on the blog bandwagon. 3.) i get to share it with jack’s friend and family and they get to contribute to his chronicles. 4.) blogs evlove and grow as they are created from numerous perspectives. as a result blogs are poorly written, which contributes to their validity as an honest form of online community building. to hear more about this check out the library of congress’s lecture on blogs. there, i’ve covered myself so my writer friends can’t say much about the misspelled words (i mean typos) or the sentence fragments or the fact that i don’t use capital letters most of the time. 5.) the blog software is part of my web hosting service and this is a good opportunity to experiment with it. 6.) the glow of the computer screen at 3am helps keep me awake so i can feed jack while the rest of the world sleeps.

hope to read your comments in the coming weeks, months, and years. happy blogging.
— chris, jack’s dad