Triangles and Stupid Kevin Tricks

Last night, I went with four friends from church to the National Symphony Orchestra's performance of Handel's Messiah at the Kennedy Center. Overall, it was a wonderful performance, and I tremendously enjoyed sharing the experience with friends. (It's not LW's cup of tea, so she took the boys out to admire the Christmas lights in the nearby neighborhoods.)

I changed into a suit and tie in my office and left my uniform in my office, then headed over to meet my friends for dinner at CPK. We were a little worried at first that the traffic would prevent them from joining me for dinner, but the timing worked out perfectly. They trusted me to order a few pizzas and a salad for us all to share. I ordered, and the food was delivered to the table mere moments before they walked in the door. We had plenty of time to eat without feeling rushed, then drove over to the Kennedy Center.

C, me, and J at Kennedy Center

This was my first time to the Kennedy Center. It's ginormous and spectacular inside and out.


Of course, anytime you attend a live performance such as this, there will be little differences in how they present it to make it their own. For example, one section I'm used to hearing sung by the soprano was sung by the baritone. Another part that I am used to hearing done by the brass section was done by the wood-winds, and the wood-winds have never stood out in my mind as a prominent feature of previous Messiah performances. Those differences are easy to adapt and enjoy. However, there was one key difference that really threw me for a loop.

Before the performance, I was reading the program and noted the list of instruments included. Among the list of the usual violins, cellos, french horns, trumpets, and trombones, there was listed one triangle. I laughed, leaned over to my friend M sitting next to me and said, "There's a triangle down there somewhere." We spent a few moments scanning the orchestra trying to find the triangle. M guessed that it would be in the percussion section. (She was right, BTW). We joked about how we wouldn't be able to hear it over the rest of the orchestra, so why bother with it?

On went the performance, and when we got to my most favorite part...

And the government shall be upon his shoulders And his name shall be called

BRRRRRIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGG!!!!
Wonderful counselor, Almighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace

It sounded like someone wheeled in a 2-ton version of the classic alarm clock with the two dome-shaped bells on top and was wailing on the bells with a sledge hammer at the speed of a hummingbird's wings. There in the percussion section of the orchestra stood a man who must have been a professional body-builder by day in order to lift this very manly triangle. Ney, not a triangle. It was a

It would be inappropriate to use lower-case letters to describe this TRIANGLE. It had the diameter of a steam-roller. I think it was made from some recycled battleship gun barrel. Even from our seats up in the nose-bleed section, we could see the guy's rippling muscles as he lifted up that TRIANGLE.

Each time the chorus got to my favorite part, he beat the holy crap out of that darned TRIANGLE so hard that the echos of it ringing reverberated through my skull for several moments after the percussionist had set down his monstrous instrument, turned the page of his music and taken his seat.

After he did this the first time, M and I turned and looked at each other and laughed out loud at how wrong we were to assume that the TRIANGLE was such an un-manly instrument or that we would never notice it in the performance.

Stupid Kevin Tricks Vol 37 Ed 342

For those of you who aren't in the DC area or didn't notice in the news, the weather forecast last night was calling for heavy snow starting last night and throughout the day today. During the intermission, we stepped outside briefly to see the first snow starting to gently fall. It was very surreal and beautiful out on the terrace outside the Kennedy Center overlooking the Potomac River as the snowflakes slowly fell - only visible in the shafts of light from the spotlights under the evenly spaced trees on the terrace. After a short while, the house lights flicked on and off and signaled that it was time for us to return to our seats.

When we came out of the Kennedy Center, the roads weren't too bad, but they were a little slippery and traffic was already a mess with more traffic accidents than the emergency crews could keep up with. We left just after 10:30 p.m. and proceeded to creep home on I-66 in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

It was quiet initially in the minivan as we all had our cell phones open - texting and facebooking our experience at the Messiah performance while our driver listened to the traffic on WTOP. As time ticked on, the conversation in the car picked up as one-by-one, each of our cell phone batteries died.

Two and a half hours after departing the Kennedy Center, we finally arrived at my car in the Dulles North commuter parking lot where I had caught the bus to work that morning. I geared up - gloves on, hat on, backpack in hand, braced for the cold, got out of the car and trudged through the few inches of snow on the ground to my car. Brushed snow off my windshield, headlights, windows, then tried to open my car door... nothing.

You see, my car has the RFID keyless entry system where I just have the keys in my pocket and it senses that I'm there and allows me to open the door and start the car. I never even think about where my keys are, because they're always just in my pocket.

Yyyyyeah, not so much.

The keys weren't in my pocket. They were in the pocket of my uniform back in my office in Crystal City.

Me and that tall pointy-hat that said "DUNCE" on it got back into the van to humbly ask J for a ride home because I forgot my car keys. We made three stops to drop people off at their various homes, and then J took me to our house. I figured he would just drop me off and I'd worry about getting my car later. He insisted that I go in and get the spare set of keys and that we go back and get the car immediately before conditions got any worse.

By the time I got back to my house for the last time, it was 3:30 a.m. I didn't get out of bed until about 9 a.m. When I did sleepily stagger down the stairs, I was glad J took me back to get my car last night. There was 11 inches of snow on the back deck when first walked into the kitchen and measured it. As I write this on Saturday afternoon, we now have 21 inches of snow on our back deck, and it's still coming down hard.


I hope you all are safe and sound and enjoying some quality time with your family over the holidays - whether you're snowed in or not.

Where the Hell is Matt? 2008 Edition

I don't know what it is about watching Dancing Matt that is so addicting.

If you have no idea who Dancing Matt is, then watch this first...



After he did his first trip around the world, he went back and did a couple of subsequent trips with sponsorship from Stride gum.

He's got a pretty cool Where the Hell is Matt website with outtakes and cool behind the scenes stuff, too.

Many thanks to MetroDad for bringing to my attention that the 2008 edition is out. He changed it up a bit this year. The first thing you'll notice is the change in music. Besides the music though, it was interesting to see how many people danced WITH Matt this time around. I'm curious if that was due to his popularity from his previous trips, or if he put word out in advance on the internet like, "hey, I need people in Paris to meet me and dance at this place and time," or if it was just random people he gathered together at each spot. Here's the 2008 edition of Where the Hell is Matt? If this image is grainy, go to YouTube and you can click on "watch in high quality" right below the video.



I think the Poria, Papua New Guinea segment is my favorite this year. What's yours?

I got tagged...

C over at Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Sanity tagged me with this meme.

THE RULES:
1. Once you are tagged, link back to the person who tagged you.
2. Post THE RULES on your blog.
3. Post 7 weird or random facts about yourself on your blog.
4. Tag 7 people and link to them.
5. Comment on their blog to let them know they have been tagged.

Um... Are you sure you want me to write SEVEN things??? Given that I tend to be verbose, I would grab a cup of coffee and make yourself comfortable, because this might take a while.

1. I'm a direct descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall. I did a term paper on him for one of my undergrad classes, and in the USD Law Library I found a collection of his private letters. It was so cool to sit and read letters written by this long lost relative of mine to and from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.





2. My favorite candy is orange sticks (milk chocolate on the outside with orange jelly stuff on the inside). It's the thing I most look forward to when I dump out the contents of my stocking on Christmas morning. The flavors of orange and chocolate together are just sooooo good. I also love the Mocha Valencia (orange flavored mocha) at Starbucks.

3. As if it wasn't obvious that I love food and my life seems to revolve around the search for good food, good restaurants, and good service. One of my Sailors pointed out to me that whenever I give somebody directions or try to describe a geographic location, I always use restaurants as landmarks. It was on the midwatch one night on deployment. We were bored and reminiscing about some of the places we looked forward to going when we got back home. One of my guys said, "Have you noticed all the landmarks you use to describe geographic locations are restaurants, sir? You'll say, 'Go down highway XYZ past the Wokery (best Chinese place around), hang a left at that little red wooden shack with the awesome lobster rolls, and it's down there across the street from the Indian place."

4. For most of the 7th and 8th grade I was on crutches due to a series of surgical procedures on my legs. I had my first surgery in the summer before I started 7th grade. My dad was Navy and we had just moved to San Diego that summer, so I was a new kid starting at a new junior high school... on crutches. So while all the popular kids were skateboarding or surfing, I stayed home and played on my computer. Do you think that may have had an influence on why I was a nerd in high school and I'm still such a computer geek today?

5. International travel is one of my favorite experiences in life. I was always envious of my Dad getting to visit so many foreign countries in the Navy. The first time I got to leave the country was when I went to Japan with my mom when I was 7 years old. We had hosted several Japanese exchange students, and so my mom took me on a trip to go visit several of our exchange students and their families, and we got to tour all over Japan.

I was blessed with parents that raised me to be pretty independent and gave me a pretty long leash. They allowed me to go on my first unaccompanied plane trip when I was 8 years old to go visit my grandparents in Colorado. After I got scuba certified when I was 14, I went on several one and two-day trips down into Baja California, Mexico to go scuba diving with complete strangers from a dive shop in San Diego. After my dad retired from the Navy and we moved to Oregon, I used to go on weekend trips from Portland out to the Oregon coast (~3 or 4 hour drive) to go scuba diving off Newport and Tillamook. In high school, I got to travel alone by air to Canada (EXPO '86 in Vancouver), to Japan, to Korea, and to England. It was a deal I had with my parents - maintain good grades and get to fly someplace in the summertime. In the first three cases, I flew alone and then stayed with friends who lived there, and in the England case it was with an organized exchange program, so I was never on total independent ops while I was on the ground. Still, I know a lot of my friends' parents were nowhere near as trusting and would never have allowed them to go on those trips like I did. I know many of my high school classmates in Oregon had never left the COUNTY much less the STATE much less the COUNTRY before.

Since I joined the Navy... whoa... I mean, that's one of the reasons why I joined the Navy and why I've stayed in the Navy was to see the world. I've been to Norway, Florida (hey, leaving your homeport of Groton to go to Fort Lauderdale in February is AWESOME), Puerto Rico (dozens of times), Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, the Suez Canal, France, Gibraltar, Japan (a few times), Korea (several times), Okinawa (I know, part of Japan, but it's separated a bit), Guam (too many times to count), Australia, Saipan, Hawaii (a couple of times for port calls before actually being stationed here), Canada, Alaska, England, Spain, Portugal, the Panama Canal. Oh, and I'm a bluenose and an emerald shellback.

Okay, enough with #5 already. I guess that was a little bit TMI for a "random fact" huh?

6. I love Gilbert and Sullivan. My favorite song is the "Modern Major General" song from The Pirates of Penzance. My grandparents instilled in me an appreciation for classical music and performing arts. They would take me to musicals, ballets, and plays growing up, and they were big fans of Gilbert & Sullivan. I actually went to a performing arts school near LA for 3rd through 6th grade. One day not long after I started 3rd grade there, I was walking along and heard a familiar tune from a classroom down the hall. They were singing, "We sail the ocean blue, in our saucy ships of beauty, we are sober men and true, and attentive to our duty..." from HMS Pinafore. I walked down the hall and peeked in the door. The teacher saw me and asked what I wanted. I told her I knew the song and I was looking to see who was singing it. She gasped, "You KNOW this song?!?!" I don't know if it's possible for a 3rd grader to be drafted, but I soon found myself as a member of Mrs. K's school chorus preparing for a big Gilbert & Sullivan show at Cal State Dominguez Hills. (Aside: I later got to play the kid in The King and I - "Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect - I'm afraid...").

Last spring back in Norfolk, I was really excited when the Norfolk opera house was putting on a kids' show of Pirates of Penzance. It was a kids' day at the opera, and they had lots of kids activities set up on the grass in front of the opera house. I don't know if my kids got much out of it, but it brought me great joy to share that with my boys. (Except I missed my favorite song because YS had to go pee RIGHT at that moment...)



7. My hero or the person I have most admired in my life is my Grandpa Ernie. Man, if you thought I wrote too much for #5 and #6 above, I better just stop here for the night and save this for another blog post. (Heck, I coulda written a whole blog post just on topics 5 and 6!) I just hope that I can teach my kids half as much as Grandpa Ernie has taught me, and I hope someday my kids and someday my grandkids will look up to me as much as I look up to my Grandpa. I regret that in the busy life of parenting and navy life that I lead now that I have not been good at keeping in touch with Grandpa as an adult, but he had such a profound impact on my upbringing that he is always in the back of my mind. I think of Grandpa when I sing Gilbert & Sullivan songs to my boys in the bathtub, when I take my boys hiking, when I try to get my boys to appreciate foreign cultures, languages, or foods, when I help ES to learn the planets in the solar system and the Greek Gods the planets were named for, when we go to a science museum, when we launch rockets, when we see the Blue Angels... Like I said, I could be here all night if I started writing about my Grandpa. I'm sorry I don't do a better job of keeping in touch, Grandpa, but you are always on my mind.


Wrap-Up: I'm still pretty new to blogging. I think most of the other blogs I read are people who have been around awhile and already done this meme before, so I can't come up with seven people to tag. I will tag One Crazy Adventure, The A Team, and Black Shoe though, since I couldn't find any blog posts with "7 random facts" or "tag" or "meme" in them.

Merry Christmas!

I mentioned about what a great job FPC did with the Christmas Eve service, but didn't really elaborate. They had several members of the Honolulu Symphony playing along with the choir. The baritone soloist Leon Williams talked about what the Advent candle signified to him, and then he sang Emmanuel. He mentioned that he had sung at the White House and toured to thirty other cities per year singing. He's an excellent soloist. When we got home, I googled him and found tons of listings about him. Here's one of the biographies I found about him from the Santa Barbara symphony website:

Soloist: Leon Williams, Baritone
American baritone Leon Williams enjoys a fine reputation on several continents for his handsome voice, charismatic personality and superb musicianship. Concert appearances include Carmina Burana with the Florida, Westchester, National and Colorado Symphonies; Britten's War Requiem and the Mozart and Faure Requiems with the Colorado Symphony; Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony with the Portland Symphony; Haydn's Il Ritorno di Tobia and Harold Farberman's War Cry on a Prayer Feather with the American Symphony Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center; Weill's Lindberghflug with Dennis Russell Davies and the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; Mahler's Rueckerlieder with Christoph Eschenbach at Japan's Pacific Music Festival; Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Eighth Symphony with Leon Botstein at New York's Bard Festival; Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Christmas Carols with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at Carnegie Hall; Beethoven's Mass in C at France's Colmar Festival; and Copland's Old American Songs with the Warren Philharmonic.

Passionately devoted to the art of song, Williams has given recitals in Hartford, Princeton, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Milan, Tokyo, Munich and throughout his native New York City, including Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Hall, the 92nd Street Y, where he performed a much acclaimed Poulenc program with Dalton Baldwin and Michel Senechal, The Guggenheim Museum and Florence Gould Hall.

Williams’ success on the operatic stage includes performances at Hawaii Opera Theatre, Toledo Opera and several concert versions including the role of Porgy in Porgy and Bess with Yuir Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A native of New York City and a graduate of Westminster Choir College, The Boys Choir of Harlem and The Juilliard School, Mr. Williams currently resides in Kailua, Hawaii and most enjoys offering his musical gifts in worship at First Presbyterian Church of Honolulu.

Continuing to support Hawaii's Tourism Industry- Sunday Recap

First thing this morning, we got up and headed out to Hanuama Bay to go snorkeling. It's at the southeastern corner of the island, and has a reputation as the best place to go snorkeling in Oahu.

"Map" of Hanuama Bay from the State Park's website.

Logistics Summary:
- Parking costs $1.
- The average Joe off the street has to pay $5 per person to get in.
- If you're military AND stationed on the island (you have to show something that proves you have a local address in addition to your military ID), then it's free.
- On your first visit there, you have to watch a 9-minute cheesy video that sings cutesy songs about not feeding or touching the fish and not walking on the reef. After you've seen the video once, you can sign their "return visitor" list and you don't have to watch the film again for 1 year. (Cue Seinfeld Soup Nazi sound effect: "No film for you! Come back, one year!").
- It's a decent hike down the hill to the beach. There is a shuttle bus that will drive you down to the beach for 50 cents and carry you back up the hill for $1. (Children 3 and under are free). We hoofed it both ways.

Self-portrait of me and ES watching the fishies.

A rare glimpse of the very energetic and never stationary YS-fish.

We had a great time snorkeling and saw a TON of fish. We got enough pictures of enough different types of fish, I could make my own fish identification guidebook. We saw bluestriped snappers, reef triggerfish, lagoon triggerfish, multiple types of parrotfish, goatfish, bird wrasse, butteryflyfish, trumpetfish, puffer fish, convict tangs, sailfin tangs, flounder...

That's just off the top of my head. I could post dozens of pictures here, but I'll save most of them for Shutterfly later. Here's a sample of the scenery in Hanuama Bay from our measly little 4-megapixel camera (see tangent on cameras below):

A school of "Convict Tang" fish
(note the black & white stripes, hence "convicts")

Here's a picture of the hill you have to walk down to the beach (and back up again when you're through) unless you want to pay to ride the tram. Yes, the road coming down the hill looks "white" because that's the long line of MORE PEOPLE coming down to the beach.
Oh, so when you go to the beach and it's time to go, you tell you're kids, "Okay, it's time to go!" What do your kids do? Here's what YS does when we tell him it's "time to go":
What do the SEALS call that when they roll around in the sand and get themselves all nasty and caked with wet sand? Sugar cookies? Anyway, when we told the boys it was time to go, YS promptly DOVE into the sand and rolled around to get it EVERYWHERE (including in his mouth and all over his tongue).

Overall Assessment: We had a great time and saw a lot of fish. At the same time, I think I saw just as many fish when we went snorkeling in Ko Olina, but at Ko Olina we didn't pay for parking, didn't pay for tickets (for L & A), didn't have to sit through a lame video, didn't have to hike up and down that huge hill, and didn't have to deal with the crowds. Oh, the bathrooms at Hanuama Bay are a little nicer and cleaner than the bathrooms at Ko Olina, but when you're all covered in salt water and sand, I don't think it matters that much.

Tangent on Cameras: Over the past few years we have been very pleased with our Cannon PowerShot A520. We also bought the Canon underwater housing for it to use snorkeling and scuba diving, and were very pleased with it's ease of use and quality of pictures.

We were pretty sad when our camera died a little less than a year ago. The camera was no longer under warranty, and we'd been debating what to do. Should we pay the $100 to have it repaired, or should we give up the ghost and get a whole new camera? Unfortunately, Cannon no longer makes the A520, so we would have to get a whole new underwater housing to go with whatever new camera we bought.

Then, one day recently, we happened to walk into Walmart (so my LW tells me). There in the front was a table set up with a bunch of the previous-year's camera models they were trying to clear out of their inventory to make way for the new year's models. Wouldn't you know it? They had a brand-spanking new, still in the box Cannon PowerShot A520, and they only wanted $150 for it. The lady behind the table said something like, "Oh, nobody wants that one because it's ONLY 4 megapixels." We said, "We'll take it!" Yeah, it was $50 more than having our old one refurbished, but (a) this saved us the hassle of mailing the old one in for repairs and (b) this got us a working camera (and a brand new one at that!) in our hands before our relatives started arriving on the island. So we had it in the housing and ready to go in the water to see the fish today.

After we left Hanuama Bay, we continued our trek counterclockwise around the island and really enjoyed the scenery. Uncle A (otherwise known to YS as "that guy sitting next to Daddy in the front seat") was craving some (more) Jack-in-the-Box tacos for lunch, and who was I to say "no"? So we stopped there along the way. We drove up over the Pali overlook to check out the view on our way back home to get showered and cleaned up.

Tonight we went to dinner at P.F. Chang's (their lemon scallops are SOOO good!) in Honolulu and then went into Waikiki to see the Cirque Hawaii. Note, this show is NOT related to the Cirque du Soleil shows like in Vegas. I've wanted to see one of the Cirque du Soleil shows for a long time now, but alas, I have never been to one, so I can't tell you how they compare.

Overall, the Cirque Hawaii show was fairly entertaining, but nowhere near worth what we paid for the tickets (even with the ITT discount). The cast was made up of some very talented gymnasts who did some amazing things that I could never twist or bend or balance or twirl my body to do (without substantial injury to myself or someone nearby). The boys seemed mildly amused by it, but I don't think they have an appreciation for what they can and can't get their bodies to do at this young age in their lives. I know that I could NEVER do those stunts. ES says he didn't like it. YS wouldn't say, but he did clap several times during the performance. In any case, it was amusing, but I would NOT pay to see this show again.

Two Videos to Share...

Friends and family have sent me a few interesting videos in the past couple of days.

Note: First, scroll down and click PAUSE on my blog music so that you can hear the sound that goes with the video.

This one is gross, and I'm going to remember it every time we ever stay in another hotel again...




This one is pretty neat / cool / funny / enjoyable to watch...

Ahhh, December!

Can you believe it's the last day of November? Thanksgiving has come and gone and we've got our Christmas decorations out. I just put up the lights around the rain gutter and it looked very plain and boring. LW really brought it to life though and did an awesome job with the garland with a strand of lights around the posts in front of our house, plus some red bows, red ornaments, two lit-up penguins, and a submarine wreath on our front door.

Here are three of my favorite things about this time of year (not in any particular order):

- Handel's Messiah. I have mentioned before how military brats can generally place a memory within one or two years' timespan because they remember what house (or church) they were in. The first time I remember hearing Handel's Messiah and it registering in my brain what I was listening to was at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in San Pedro, CA. So that had to have been 3rd or 4th grade when we lived in the San Pedro Navy Housing.

A lot of people just think of this as the "Hallelujah" chorus, but it's sooo much more than that. To be quite honest, the Hallelujah chorus is kind of over-played. It's nice, but so many people use it as a "sound bite" you hear it all the time. I have several almost-favorite parts, but my absolute favorite is the "For Unto Us a Child is Born" in the middle of Part I.

For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given:
And the government shall be upon His shoulder:
And His name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

I first became familiar with Handel because of my parents singing in the church choir growing up. For several years now, my mom has sung for the San Diego Master Chorale (picture above). It's been a wonderful treat for me on a handful of occasions to attend some of her Messiah performances in San Diego.

- The Nutcracker. In addition to my parents, I was very blessed to have the influence of my Grandma Kay and Grandpa Ernie on my upbringing. They loved the fine arts and always took me to see performing arts and museums. It's through my grandparents that I learned an appreciation for classical music and Gilbert & Sullivan musicals.

I don't remember exactly when I started going to see the Nutcracker, but it was sort of a Christmas-season tradition for me up through college. LW doesn't care for the ballet much, but she appeased me and went with me to see the Boston Ballet perform The Nutcracker when we got engaged, and it was awesome.

I think in another couple of years I may try to take the boys to see it. I don't think they'd understand it or sit still through it just yet.

- The Army-Navy football game. I am like Bubblehead in that I didn't go to the Naval Academy, but I love the Army-Navy football game. I think I've actually been to the game four times now...
- 1986: My dad took me to my first Army-Navy football game when they played at the Rosebowl, and it was AWESOME.
- 1995: My roommates during prototype in Charleston were USNA grads, and I went with Nate to the game in Philadelphia.
- 1997: Just after we got engaged, LW and I went to the game at Giant Stadium with our friends Chris and Cath (Cath's younger brother was a mid then).
- 2005: I took ES to his first Army-Navy game two years ago in Philadelphia with my friend and former stateroom-mate, Rich.

ES's class mascot "Wings" at the 2005 Army-Navy Game. Each kid in the class got to take Wings home for a weekend and write in a journal about what they did over the weekend, so we took him to the Army-Navy Game.

Me and ES at the 2005 Game (we froze our butts off and had to leave early before poor ES turned into a popsicle).

I love all the tradition and ceremony of the game. The midshipmen and the cadets all march into the stadium. Then you get flyovers by jets and helicopters, and guys will parachute in with the flag for the national anthem. Then they have the exchanging of the prisoners. A handful of cadets go to Annapolis and some mids go to West Point as exchange students each semester. Before the game begins though, they get returned to their home team in an "exchanging of the prisoners ceremony" on the football field.

Exchanging of the Prisoners Ceremony

Each time either team scores, they shoot their cannon or artillery piece and all the plebes do pushups. If the President is there, he starts the game sitting on one side of the field rooting for one team, then at halftime, they have a ceremony where he crosses the field to sit with the other side and rooting for the other team. There are great fight songs the mids sing like, "Gooooooo Migh-ty Na-vy, Go! Go! Migh-ty Na-vy!" and "Go - Navy - Go! Beat Army!"

Unfortunately, you don't get all the ceremony and tradition when you watch it on TV. I still like to watch the game though. That being said, it's time to set the DVR to record it in case I don't wake up in time, and then it's time to hit the rack.

GO NAVY! BEAT ARMY!