It was unfortunate that the Argos made the decision this week to cut Bashir Levingston. He's provided as much excitement as a fan could ever want from a returner and we hope he lands in a good football situation soon. Good luck, Bash. 

And now to get back to our regularly scheduled smarminess...

Rusty's Picks:

Montreal at B.C.:

Aside from learning that Bob O'Billovich is the proud owner of three pink suitcases, the biggest revelation from last year's Grey Cup was that the Als hate cold weather. Ben Cahoon spent most of the game in sweatpants and Mark Estelle and the defensive backs spent most of the game jockeying for position in front of one of the large heaters. So as I see it, the Lions have two options: either they can make it freezing cold in BC Place or they can place heaters on the Als sidelines to distract them. Their choice. 

Pick: B.C.

Winnipeg at Saskatchewan

Wait a minute, these two have the best records in the league?  Dogs are mating with cats... Marty York's rumours are all true... John Huard is a brilliant head coach... Run for your lives! 

Pick: Saskatchewan

Toronto at Hamilton

So just weeks after he apologises to Argonaut fans, Frank D'Angelo has performed in front of the Canadian Armed Forces at the Meaford base and is considering giving performances in Afghanistan. While it's nice that he's trying to help the troops (a couple of kegs of Sleeman's would probably be better recevied) we note that after being rightfully booed at the Rogers Centre, Mr. D'Angelo told Perry Lefko that "we're the wrong genre for CFL fans. They're rock people." What are the odds that the troops are the right genre for Frank?

(Note: We could see the miltary strategy of having Frank play to the Taliban. He's Canada's nuclear option.)

More to the point though, the Argos and Cats have the worst records in the league. Yet you have to think that if they still existed that the Renegades would somehow find a way to be worse. Long live Ontario pro football.

Pick: Toronto

Edmonton at Calgary

The Stamps ended up spending one of their days off this week playing paintball.  One can only assume that it took many hours to explain to Jeff Pilon that you aren't supposed to squeeze the balls.

Pick: Calgary

A-Rad's Picks:

Montreal at B.C.

Only in Vancouver would there be serious discussion of curing your team's injuries by going to an "energy healer" who replaces your "bad" energy with your "good" energy. But then, this being Vancouver, there's probably a much more traditional way of doing that. And honestly, I kind of like the idea of a stoned Dave Dickenson wandering around the sidelines infuriating Wally Buono by craving all kinds of high-cholesterol snacks.

Pick: B.C.

Winnipeg at Saskatchewan

Apparently, Roughriders lineman Gene Makrowsky has been sidelined for much of the year by mono. This strikes me as highly suspicious. What 34-year-old gets mono? Considering he plays in Saskatchewan, has no one considered the possibility that he was just really bored? Did Wayne's World teach us nothing?

Pick: Winnipeg

Toronto at Hamilton

For those interested, Timmychang.net provides a helpful list of pro football players of Asian heritage. It's interesting reading, but there is one dramatic, unforgiveable oversight: Whither Brian Ah-Yat?

You've got a lot to learn about this league, Timmy. A lot to learn.

Pick: Toronto

Edmonton at Calgary

You have to love that the judge who overturned A.J. Gass' suspension is an Eskimos' season ticket holder. If Robert Baker had known there are judges who'll let you off the hook if they like your CFL team, he'd totally have stuck around.

Pick: Calgary

Bonus pick: 

All of the Argos have been injured in practice, leaving Pinball to play the Ticats by himself. To boost Hamilton's tourism, Pinball has been challenged to sample its finest cultural institution by eating a donut at each of the city's 1,400 Tim Horton's locations before gametime. How does Pinball do?*

Boatmenblog pick: Pinball 1,612, Ticats 0. (All those donuts just make Pinball even more dominant. For one thing, he's inspired to ensure there's one more donut on the scoreboard. And really, do you want to face Pinball when he's on a sugar high? With all that extra energy, he's just more dominant...and is able to hug every single fan in the stands at each commercial break.)

* = Everything we need to know about football analysis, we learned from early '90s SNL sketches.  

As we count down the days until our collective hero Michael Bishop returns to action, we must savour the little things in life. And so we take great solace in a column brought to our attention by our friend Neate Sager, which suggests that Boatmenblog nemesis Jack Todd has fully and completely gone off the deep end.

The point, we think, is that Jack doesn't like blogs. To make this point, he writes today's entire column in what he appears to think is blogger's jargon. A sample:

So here we are. The Monday Morning blog. Since blogging is just tew kewl, a blog it is. (Although you have our permission to go on referring to this little number as a "column" but only if joo are both over 60 and TTLY kewl.)

Where were we? Yes, chilluns, the MMQB has been away. Away chillin'. So 10X to both of U who wrote wondering if the MMQB had been a) fired; b) hanged by Michael Vick after losing a fight with Earl the Pearl; c) replaced by Zeke Herbowsky or d) all of the above.

So, c'mon people. :) :) :) 'cuz you KNOW you ain't been smiling on Monday mornings since you haven't had a MMQB to hate, am I right? Get with it 2da and don't wait until 2moro because by 2moro, we will all have had frontal lobotomies and we'll be sitting in the basement arguing whether we should be watching the WWE, NASCAR or Ultimate Fighting.

Now, there are many things to criticize blogs for. Wasting your time at work, for instance. Or needlessly antagonizing a nice guy like Frank D'Angelo. Or giving Damien Cox another place to whine about stuff.

But whatever Jack is parodying, it's not any blog we've ever seen. As far as we can tell, what he's actually sending up is text messaging, if it were popular to intermittently insert late-'90s ebonics into text messaging.

We have to admit - we're really, really hope this column stemmed from Jack Googling himself and stumbling onto us making fun of him. If not, please advise him to do so. To put it in terms he'll understand, there are a lot of people LOL-ing at him today.

So the season obviously hasn't gone the way we'd like it so far.  Any word on if Winnipeg will start Mike Quinn, just for old times sake?

Rusty's Picks:

Toronto at Winnipeg:

OK, I'll admit it. I feel bad for Jermaine Mays, who was released by the Argos last week.  The man went out of his way to tell people that he'd like to be referred to in media guides and TV broadcasts as "Sexy Mayes," and yet no one has started a campaign to bring Sexy back. Shameful.

Pick: Toronto

Hamilton at Montreal:

This photo might be more entertaining than most Ticats gamesSo having already used up The Good Thief, the CBC needs to find a new Nick Nolte movie to run over the end of this week's game. So long as it's not that horrendous I Love Trouble disaster, I think we'll all be OK. Fine, I'll admit that this
was simply written to run the accompanying photo.

Pick: Montreal

A-Rad's picks:

Toronto at Winnipeg:

Ah, Manitobans. So different from us. A tough, rugged people, accustomed to a hard life but knowing of nothing different. And so hostile toward Torontonians.

Into this hostile environment, against all the odds, goes one man. All together now. Rocky!...Rocky!...Rocky!...Rocky! He will change everything Manitobans think they know about Toronto. And when he's done, he'd damn well better give a speech like this.

Pick: Toronto

Hamilton at Montreal:

I know Montreal is a liberal town and everything. But I have to say - I'm a little taken aback by the pornography openly on display on the Als' website.

Now, granted, to you or me this probably doesn't qualify as porn. But I'm pretty sure that if you're Bryan Chiu it does.

Pick: Montreal

Bonus Pick:

All of the Argos have been injured in practice, leaving Pinball to play the Bombers by himself. Hoping for a close contest to keep viewers interested, TSN borrows Nick Nolte from the CBC and unleashes him on the field with the sole mission of stopping Pinball. How does Pinball do?*

Boatmenblog pick: Pinball 1,623, Als 0. (Nick Nolte proves more a hindrance than a help to the Bombers - running around in circles for most of the first half, then spending the entire second half gnawing on his own leg. With only 12 men on the field to stop Pinball, he earns a respectable score by his standards. It would be even higher, but over the course of the game he's distracted by contract negotiations with 18 more running backs to compete with John Avery.)

* = Everything we need to know about football analysis, we learned from early '90s SNL sketches. 

We know we shouldn't have been as amused by this as we were. And it's probably not quite as funny in retrospect as it was when it was actually happening, since watching on Youtube isn't quite the same as joining 30,000 other fans in slowly realizing how it's going to end. But when you're mired in a 4-game losing streak, you have to take your bright spots where you can get them. And so, in case you missed it, allow us to present to you the unequivocal highlight of the Argos' last home game.

 

In case you're wondering where some of us have been the past little while, we've been moving, travelling, starting new day jobs...and finally caving in by joining Facebook.

Okay, that last one is pretty inconsequential, save for one glorious aspect of it: the discovery of a whole slew of Argos' Facebook pages.

If you're on there, we highly recommend doing a search on your CFL player of choice; there's a good chance he's got a page, and there's an even better chance it'll be awesome.

In the meanwhile, a few observations:

• If we were going to hang with one Argo's Facebook friends, it would have to be the collection of talent that Jordan Younger has assembled. The dude has the most photos of girls in cheerleaders' this side of Charlie Sheen.
  
• Among the unlikeliest recurring characters among assorted Argos' Facebook friends? Councillor Mark Grimes. 
  
• Possibly a more predictable recurring character? This person. We don't know who she is, but she's friends with a lot of Argos.
  
• Speaking of which, if you're young, female and go to York University, it appears there's an excellent chance you're friends with at least one Argo. Cliff Ivory is going to own that place.
  
• There are not one, not two but three Facebook groups dedicated to Edmontonians' severe hate-on for Danny Maciocia: "Fire Maciocia," "I hate Danny Maciocia" and the somewhat more verbose "Let the Esks Return to Greatness: Fire Danny Maciocia Now!"
  
  Maciocia!

We swear, we'll come up with something a little more entertaining soon. Momentarily, even. But for now, let's take a moment to celebrate our man Clifford Ivory finding work in Toronto's football community.

We know what you're thinking: Toronto has a football community? Well, sort of. Outside the Argos, we basically have two crappy university teams. But Cliff is going to go coach for one of those teams, and we're fully confident he'll make it a little less crappy.

(We assume this move may also have something to do with Andre Durie leaving York, coming to the Argos and stealing Cliff's jersey number. Now Cliff will go steal...actually, we're not really sure, since defensive coordinators generally don't wear jerseys. But we're pretty sure it'll be something good.)

Now updated with bonus pick.

Does it really count as a week in the CFL when all of the Eastern teams are on byes?  (Yes, we're still pissed off by the shamefully exclusive Safeway Touchdown To Win contest)

Rusty's Picks:

BC at Calgary:

Really? Duncan O'Mahony is back in the league?  That's a shame, because if the Stamps had pulled another Mark McLaughlin and installed Jim Barker as their punter for the week, I would have been Stamps fans for life.

Pick: Calgary

Edmonton at Saskatchewan:

Ok, when I made the A.J. Gass comment last week, I was unaware that he apparently through Comisky's helmet because he was being grabbed in the groin. You would think that they would have developed some sort of equipment to lessen the chance of that sort of thing happening.  

Pick: Saskatchewan

Bonus Pick:

How does Pinball spend the bye week?

Boatmenblog pick: 

Monday: 9:00 AM to 9:02 AM - devises plan to beat Winnipeg. 9:02 AM to 11:00 AM - takes a nap and finds a solution to world energy crisis

Tuesday: Breaks own record by hugging 6,428 people during the day

Wednesday: Pinball decides to go to a Thai cooking class. He masters Thai cooking within 5 minutes. Spends the rest of the day teaching the class.

Thursday: Figures out a way to defy gravity. Chooses not to, because he always obeys the rules.

Friday: Constructs a 100 foot statue of Willie Pless out of steel reinforced concrete. Destroys statue by running through it while demonstrating how he used to score touchdowns.

 

Update: Fear not, Pinball-watchers...the weekly bonus pick is now available.

***

Dang, I hit the Marty York line last week. Seems I should just stick to picking the opposite of A-Rad, who is currently still in Europe.  Will he update this post with some picks?  Guess we'll wait and see.

Rusty's Picks:

Calgary at Montreal

So it seems we have our first celebration controversy of the year, and to nobody's surprise it involves the Stampeders. Now, we are on the record as supporting celebrations given that football is intended to be a form of entertainment and think this particular celebration will help the league as it made a week 6 game a bit more memorable and will surely add fuel to the fire at the Labour Day game.  That being said, I'll admit to the fact that I haven't actually seen the celebration, so if Deangelis' sliding knocked over a bunch of orphans then we totally take back our approval. 

Pick: Calgary

Saskatchewan at Toronto:

Kent Austin's certainly working out better than I thought he would.  I guess there's something about guys in watermelon helmets that inspires him.  Wish I'd known that last year - there have to be a couple of Argo fans that'd be willing to wear the world's largest blueberry on their head. 

Pick: Toronto

Winnipeg at BC:

So it appears the Jarious Jackson era has probably come to an end in BC.  After last week's loss Wally Buono was quoted as saying "What I expected [from Jackson] was somebody who I thought was a little bit better. Now we have a quarterback that's maybe just a bit fragile." 

He's a shrewd GM, that Wally. Jackson's trade value is sure to soar through the roof. We'll give you Rocky Butler and a picture of Doug Flutie for him.

Pick: BC

Hamilton at Edmonton

So after a practice that was punctuated by the Esks' Robert Brown having a "mini-meltdown" and screaming "we've been doing this since Day 1" over and over again, who steps up to be the voice of reason? Of course! A.J. Gass!

"We're in a hole, but we're not in a hole that we can't get out of," Gass told the Edmonton Journal. Well that certainly explains why Gass ripped the helmet off of Dan Comisky last week and flung it across the field: He was merely trying to remove any items that could potentially be used to dig a bigger hole.

Pick: Edmonton (apparently I lost the lesson)

Bonus Pick:

All of the Argos have been injured in practice, leaving Pinball to play the 'Riders by himself. Knowing that he will invariably suffer some unique and painful injury if he steps in even for a moment as the Argos' quarterback, Pinball knows that his only option is to avoid any plays whatsoever on offence. How does Pinball do?*

Boatmenblog pick: Pinball 117, Als 0. (An embarrassingly close result, by Pinball's standards. But we'll forgive him, given that whole no-offence thing. Luckily, he's able to return six punts and seven interceptions for touchdowns and boots eight field goals after turnovers on which the 'Riders somehow bring him down. To cap things off, he picks up Kerry Joseph on the game's final play and carries him 36 yards for a safety.)

* = Everything we need to know about football analysis, we learned from early '90s SNL sketches. 

So three of the Argo quarterbacks from last year are now injured (Mike Bishop, Damon Allen and Eric Crouch) and the fourth, Spergon Wynn, is presumably getting his braces off this week. This obviously puts the team in a bit of a bind for its game against the Riders on Friday, so let's go ahead and put some odds on the various candidates to take the snaps this week.

Rocky Butler (2 to 1): Tough to know what to make of Butler's first appearance as an Argo. On the one hand, the game was close and he barely lost, implying that this is his Rocky and that he'll score a victory his next time out.  On the other hand, he was terrible and tossed up four interceptions, implying that this was his Rocky V, in which case we'll need to wait another 16 years before he puts in another halfway decent performance.

Mike McMahon (8 to 1): Man, this guy's had a tough year. Rutgers finally gets good well after he's left, his car gets stolen and he loses his job to a guy who was cut by the Ti-Cats.  Not quite sure how you recover from that last one.

Tom Arth (750 to 1): This move would most likely be made just to appease the Toronto Sun headline writers who were unable to use gems like "The Arthful Dodger" and "Arth! What A Dog Of A Game!" after Tom was released in the first week of camp.

Reggie Slack (1,000 to 1): Seriously, it worked once before.  

Pinball Clemons (1,000,000,000 to 1): Obviously this would be the ideal situation, as it is well established that Pinball wouldn't even need a supporting cast to beat the Riders. However, much like Superman wouldn't play a football game against a bunch of high school kids, we see Pinball as being much to moral to actually play. Pity.

There are times in life when something so glorious happens that you just don't know what to say. 

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