but thanks to the National Post for running our ramblings on the CFL

http://www.canada.com/topics/sports/baseball/story.html?id=c03907f4-8b9c-4614-9567-6b604c03fd12

After taking a few months off to recharge our batteries and question a higher power that would allow the Riders to win a Grey Cup (we're only now over it), we're back and ready to continue our efforts to bring about the end of civilization.

As we start our third year of this endeavour, we promise that we will continue to search for the lighter side of the most enjoyable league in the country and that we will continue to have an unhealthy fascination with Pinball Clemons and stadium scoreboard races.

In the weeks leading up to the season, we will be rolling out of team previews to help you get caught up on all of the changes made in the offseson.  The departures of Kent Austin and Scott Coe, the re-emergence of Roy Shivers, the big Ronald Flemons trade.... wait a minute...
Is that a Matt Dunigan cooking show? 

It's going to be a good year.

In the past we’ve hoped that the “tags” that we’ve been putting at the end of each article would help people find articles that they might be interested; however, it was impossible to put every possible tag on every article. The solution? We’ve added a search bar to the left hand side of the page.

So now if you’d like to see how many times we’ve contradicted ourselves about Michael Bishop’s potential, all you have to do is enter his name into the search bar.  And yes, we fully intend on going head-to-head with Google and Yahoo in the next 6 months.

...and moderately less hung over than we were yesterday. 

One of the more frustrating things about the life of a CFL fan is that the league has a tendency to fall off the face of the earth during the off-season, since every sports journalist in the country is contractually obligated to spend the winter overanalyzing the mid-season exploits of the local hockey team. But while we might make a better case for ourselves as sports journalists than, say, Jack Todd, we're not actually sports journalists.

What's the point of all this, other than to work in another gratuitous shot at Jack Todd? The point is, we're going to keep right on doing what we've been doing right through to kickoff next June. For the rest of the week, we'll be sharing some more of our special, special moments from Grey Cup '06 as they slowly creep back into memory. And from there...well, we'll see. But it's a safe bet that Shake Severs, Frank D'Angelo and the rest of our wacky cast of characters will be involved one way or another.

This is the time of year when we start to spend a little too much time thinking about the health of placekickers and/or the exact moment at which whatever team Wally Buono is coaching will begin its annual meltdown.

Now, you could spend your day browsing a dozen different websites looking for any smidgeon of information on such subjects. And admittedly, if you're in one of those jobs where you need to kill hours at a time, that's probably your best option. But if you actually have stuff to do, we heartily recommend our daily CFL newswatch.

Remember: It's all the CFL headlines you need, without Jack Todd ever rearing his ugly head. 

We like to think that one of Boatmenblog's many important functions is to educate and enlighten. And so, even with our tireless efforts to chronicle our game-watching experiences, run Frank D'Angelo out of town and shame the Argos into reviving the world's greatest dairy-related competition, we're always looking for new ways to keep you up-to-speed.

Our latest, which you may have noticed with that myserious "CFL News" link over on the left, plays it a little more by-the-book than usual around here. But if you're bored at work, it might be our best time-waster yet. Courtesy of Cowbell Jenny, we now present a daily (or almost daily) run through the CFL headlines.

No more having to comb through the Star's sports section to find the one Argos story nestled into the corner of the eighth page, and no more risk of accidentally encountering a Steve Simmons column while trolling around the Canoe site. We'll send you right to the stories themselves. Just, you know, remember to come back here when you're done. Because all the reporters in the world won't give you Shake Severs news like we'll give you Shake Severs news.

Now that the World Cup is finally done, it's possible that the local media will rediscover the form of football in which players don't require a team of paramedics to scrape them up every time there's body contact. And it should be said that, even when everyone else is busy testing out words like "nil" and "chestbutt," the beat reporters covering the Argos do a fine job (this goes double for ones that some of us may share a newsroom and the occasional pint with). But when you're covering the games themselves, it's hard to cover the most unique part of the CFL - the stuff that happens in the stands, in the players' spare time, and at the afterparties. And if you're writing for a family audience, a lot of that stuff might not be printable anyway.

See, this is where we come in. Sure, we'll bitch about the Argos' O-line and indulge our unhealthy obsessions with the likes of Clifford Ivory and Andre Talbot. But there are plenty of sites out there - forces for both good and evil - that take these things a little seriously. So we're gonna have some fun with it. Hopefully you'll join us.