Blog round-up odds and ends

Seriously:

Congratulations to Nereus on his retirement after completing 20 years of service in the Navy!

Thanks to fastnav for pointing this Navy SEAL Memorial service out. I got pretty choked up watching it.

Not-so-serious stuff:

DadGoneMad has been on vacation this week, but he invited several guest bloggers to post in his absence. Most have been pretty funny, but this one was my favorite and had me in stitches. Here's an excerpt:

The first time I tried to teach Emmeline to use the toilet by herself, she insisted on using mine -- not the fancy blue bucket with a shiny white seat but the big standard adult kind that could have swallowed her whole with its gaping porcelain maw. But I figured if she was eventually going to graduate to a real toilet anyway, she might as well start as soon as she can. And this way seemed to involve less cleaning. With my back turned as I arranged her pile of clothes on the floor, I heard her mumble something about "pee like daddy," and I assumed she just excited about using my big toilet. I turned around to see her standing up proudly, hands on her hips, spraying the base with a wild fountain of urine.

She shouted gleefully, "Emme's peeing like daddy!"

"Well, kinda," my wife shrugged later, "But her aim is better."

If you thought that was funny, then keep reading because it gets better from there. The little girl's explanation of anatomy to the grocery store cashier is priceless.

If you're a fan of Dancing Matt, you should check out his blog. Scroll down to his July 5th entry and check out the spoof video someone made of his Dancing Matt videos. WARNING: It's not suitable for children due to sexual content (no nudity) - hence I'm not actually posting the video directly into my blog here.

Another Teleportation Song came to mind recently. I forget where I heard it, but it was just in the past couple of days that Dancing Queen by ABBA broached the threshold of my consciousness. Suddenly, my mind flashed back to the Hard Rock Cafe in Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates. It was during our 1998 deployment before Usama Bin Laden's terrorist threats started severely imposing on our port call liberty. We used to all go to the Hard Rock all the time. Back then it was the closest thing outside the confines of the port facility that didn't require driving all the way to Dubai, but I hear they've really built up the area a lot since I was there over 10 years ago. Anyway, there was this Canadian band that called themselves Cinema and played a lot of cover songs. One of their favorites was Dancing Queen, and the two female vocalists in the band sang it with such a resonance in their voices, it was just mesmerizing.

Speaking of that 1998 deployment, thanks to RM1 for bringing back not-so-fond memories of that halfway night.