Bush plays joker, honors father with 'awesome' ship

Outgoing US President George W. Bush showed off his lighter side Saturday when speaking at the commissioning ceremony of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier named after his father.

Standing in the shadow of the USS George H.W. Bush, named after the 41st president of the United States, Bush told supporters and navy personnel he was "thrilled to be here to help commission an awesome ship and to honor an awesome man."

To prepare for his speech, Bush, 62, said he researched his father's letters, and found one from the late 1940s that discussed the elder Bush's young son, Georgie.

"You should see Georgie now. Whenever I come home he greets me and talks a blue streak, sentences disjointed of course," the former president wrote in a letter read aloud by his son.

"He tries to say everything, and the results are often hilarious."

"Some things do not change," joked the current president -- infamous for his mangling of the English language -- to a laughing audience at Virginia's Norfolk Naval Station.

Bush honored his father, a naval aviator during the Second World War and US president from 1989 to 1993, by asking: "What do you give a guy who has been blessed and has just about everything he has ever needed?

"Well, an aircraft carrier."

The 6.2-billion-dollar, 95,000-ton ship is the 10th and last Nimitz-class "supercarrier" to be commissioned by the US Navy. These gargantuan nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are among the largest ships in the world.

The elder Bush noted the carrier has a 4.5-acre (1.82-hectare) landing field, a tower that soars 20 stories above the waterline and, he said, "a feature that a few of my granddaughters in particular would really like -- that's right, onboard this carrier there are a mind-boggling 1,400 telephones."