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

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=756819

Shame on you. Shame on all of you. This man sung his heart out for you last night. His version of O Canada? Splendiferous. His take on My Girl? Scrumtrilescent. His cover of the Monkeys? Better than life itself.

And as the Voice of God blessed our ears, what did you do?  You booed. You groaned. You likened him to "an Atlantic City lounge singer," as though that were a bad thing.

You don't deserve him. None of us do. All he wants to do is to entertain us. To quench our thirst with his meticulously crafted ale. To teach us important life lessons such as the need to believe in order to believe.

And still, we mock. Have you no taste? No decency? No desire to stay away from expensive litigation?

Shame.

***

Update: Let this be a lesson to all you haters out there. From the heavenly voice of the chiselled god of pulchritudinous power drinks himself:

"We played at the Beer Gardens (at the Grand Prix) and we packed it. It was like 7,000 people until 11 o'clock and we had to send them home. As I walking out these four (expletive) guys started yelling, 'You suck, man' and I yelled back, 'Not as bad as your life.'"

Is it fair that a man so blessed with superhuman talent should also possess such a rapier wit?

Well, this is disappointing - and not just because we always assumed that if Frank D'Angelo asked anyone to "seize and desist," it would be us.

See, we'd always kind of assumed Frank was in on the joke. But is it possible that he's actually not? Is it possible that he thinks those Ben Johnson commercials are actually brilliant marketing? That we're all crazy-impressed that he gets to hang out with hockey players in his spare time, trading totally unscripted banter about his beer? That his band is invited to play halftime so often because fans absolutely love it? That Argos players hang out at Forget About It after games because it's their favourite spot in town? That Steelback actually tastes good?

We're going to seize now, before we get ourselves in trouble. But let's just say this situation may be more dire than we realized.

Earlier this week Ben Johnson announced that he had finally figured out how he tested positive for steroids in Seoul in 1988. The culprit: Carl Lewis, who Johnson claims slipped the banned substance into his beer a few days before the race. (No word from Johnson as to why he tested positive later in his career, but we’ll ignore that.)

Now while we here at boatmenblog have not put in the same amount of doped blood and sweat into trying to crack this “mystery” over the past 18 years as Mr. Johnson has, we do have an alternate theory.*
Sadly, we could not confirm if a Marilyn Monroe impersonator was present in Seoul.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1988 and we’re still a few years away from Roberto Alomar’s McCain punch commercial that changed the way we viewed athletes as actors. A young apple juice executive is sitting in a bar in South Korea where he had been trying to find a cheaper supply of aluminum cans.

“If I’m going to get the business off the ground I need a big name endorser, and Hank Illesic won’t return my phone calls. But who’s bigger than Hank?”

At that time a young innocent sprinter walks into the bar to enjoy a beverage.

“Ben Johnson! Of course. But he’d be way too expensive. There must be a way to keep his celebrity status but get him cheaper…”

The juice magnate remembered the "special juice" he’d been using to propel himself to stardom as a goaltender in the B Division of the Beverage Producers of Ontario Men’s Hockey League…

To no one in particular he remarked, “Sometimes, you have to cheat... uhh to get ahead. Hey, wait a minute…”

Congrats Frank. It may have been 18 years later, but now… he cheetahs all the time.

* Note: Probably not true. Please don’t sue us.

Naturally, we're in a pretty good mood to start the week. The Argos are in first, Damon is finally spreading the ball around a bit, we're only four days from the next home game, and the karma police have already started catching up with the Lions after Wally Buono went all Mike Martz ten days ago. It's just, we'd be even happier if not for some unpleasant information we received a few days ago.

See, while the Argos were heading west last week to take on the Eskimos, our man Frank D'Angelo was heading west for a far more sinister purpose - to torment the men and women who've been nobly representing our country overseas.

Now, we won't claim to speak for our troops. But all we can say is that, if we were returning home from doing battle with the Taliban, we'd want to be greeted by our family. Then we'd want to get home, reconnect with our friends, and enjoy the comforts of, um, not being in Afghanistan. What we would not want, under any circumstances, would be to spend two nights listening to Frank D'Angelo and the Steelback 2-4 "entertain" us with their "music" - a tactic that would probably violate the Geneva Conventions if it were employed by enemy forces.

Then again, we'd probably be too busy trying to figure out why our own country was trying to poison us with "ample quantities of Steelback beer" to even notice the music.  

If we were looking for the appropriate way to celebrate our official bid for a professional sports team, we might toast the occasion with a bottle of champagne. But then, to our eternal chagrin, we're not Frank D'Angelo.

If we were, obviously, mere champagne would not suffice. Nor would our own brand of beer, for obivous reasons. (The "slightly apparent aroma of overripe stock at a rundown fruitstand in midsummer with a hint of evil" is especially a problem.) No, only cracking open a cool, refreshing Cheetah would really suit the occasion. And as we all know, the only way to really enjoy a Cheetah is to dress up like a Samurai, affect a vaguely Asian accent and humiliate Ben Johnson some more.  

Honestly, at what point do we have to stage an intervention on Ben's behalf?  

So many mixed emotions coming out of Saturday's game. We're borderline euphoric, obviously, at the Argos' complete anihilation of the Als - especially those of us who sat through that debacle in Montreal a few weeks ago. But we're also completely terrified at the prospect of Frank D'Angelo being a good luck charm.

For the record, we booed D'Angelo's entire halftime "show." We booed every Steelback ad. We wound up with much of the rest of our section booing him, too, for which we'd like to take some credit. And at one point, having had a few beers, we might have stood up, borrowed a page from former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, and loudly pronounced D'Angelo an "embarrassment to humankind."

But there's no denying it: The Argos came out for this game looking as jacked as we've ever seen them. So we have to consider the possibility, however slim, that it was D'Angelo's lounge-lizard take on O Canada - the one in which he inexplicably added an extra line at the end, just to torture us - that did the trick. Or at least, as commenter GoGades has already suggested, that Frank is the Argos' new good-luck charm.

Being generous, fair-minded sorts, there's only one solution we can think of. A short drive down the highway, there's a team struggling far worse than the Argos. A team so bad that we really do think Pinball might be able to beat them playing on his own, even if he was shrunken, nauseous or forced to use Kent Austin as his offensive coordinator. A team that's already fired its coach and released its #1 receiver, leaving it perilously low on options.

And so, good people of Hamilton, we offer you our good luck charm. Treat him gentle, and don't worry about having to pay his backup singers - as far as we can tell, their microphones aren't plugged in. As an added bonus, he can probably call a better offensive game than Joe Paopao. Our sole condition is that you keep him locked in a cage somewhere, unable to ever set foot within Toronto city limits again.

No need to thank us. Honest. 

We'd been hearing the rumblings for weeks that juice magnate/beer baron/lounge lizard/Boatmenblog nemesis Frank D'Angelo would be "performing" at this Saturday's game against the Als. As daunting a prospect as that was, we were somewhat consoled by the suspicion that the Argos were just holding their nose for this - a little quid pro quo for all the sponsorship dollars Frank sends their way. Sadly, we appear to have been mistaken.

Yesterday, regular reader Scott tipped us off that, inexplicably, the Argos are running radio ads with the appearance of  Frank D'Angelo and the Steelback 2-4 (that would be his band) as a major selling point - and the alarming news that they'd be performing "all night long." We were kind of hoping Scott had just had a horrible dream; we're still hoping the same thing about the time we passed out on the couch and woke up to find D'Angelo crooning his way through an infomercial. But today the Argos confirmed it in a press release: D'Angelo will be "performing" both the national anthem and three songs at halftime.

Yes, we know Frank's "music" is partly to raise money for charity. But we'd cut a hefty cheque just to ensure he doesn't sing. And honestly, how many people who wouldn't otherwise contribute are going to suddenly open up their wallets because they're so taken with his cover of Here for a Good Time?

We're not going to mince words: This man must be stopped. We're just not sure how. And so over to you, good readers of Boatmenblog. Stop commenting on the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of Hamilton cheerleaders, and start thinking up ways to dissuade Frank from going near a microphone again...if not for yourselves, then to prevent long-suffering Ottawa football fans from having to endure a whole season of The D'Angelo Experience next year.

Time was, one of the great pleasures of going to Argos games was the chance to hang out with the players afterward. Within an hour of the game ending, win or lose, they'd file into Joe Badali's and mingle with a common folk. This was where one of us had the first of many memorable encounters with our man Clifford Ivory - the one where he spotted us in the washroom wearing his jersey, and made us wait so he could wash up before shaking hands.

Sadly, nothing is safe from Frank D'Angelo - the kind of guy who launches products just so he can hang around commercial sets with retired hockey players and, inexplicably, with Ben Johnson.

Presumably, our man Frank got tired of having his guest stars back away in horror as soon as the camera was turned off. So, before last season, he hatched a brilliant plan: Pay the Argos to move their post-game party to his embarrassingly named King Street bar, Forget About It Supper Club. In other words, he bought some new athlete friends - ones he'd get to hang out with nine times a year, in return for some free food and drink. And as an added bonus, he'd gain a captive audience for his godawful band.

What happened next was fairly predictable. Rather than sharing his newly purchased friends, Frank set up a VIP section where their mingling would be restricted solely to him and his buddies. We're told that those fans who tried to crash Frank's private party were chased away by his thugs - a sneak preview of their being chased from the entire club, which is what happened once the players had vacated.

Shockingly, the players didn't consider exclusive time with Frank to be that much of a treat. To their eternal discredit, they also failed to appreciate his spontaneous transitions from host to lounge singer, which - we shit you not - included his trademark rendition of O Canada. So by about the third week of the '05 season, they just stopped going.

A contingent of Argos staffers, who are either the world's most devoted employees or its most devoted masochists, continued to turn up to pay Frank their respects. But even those who hadn't already been scared off by D'Angelo have apparently now stopped going, courtesy of some sort of gun-waving incident outside Forget About It following this year's season opener.

For the record, it was not D'Angelo waving the gun, nor even one of his patrons. But we love the idea of him striding into Badali's, where some of the Argos have apparently started going again, and marching them back to Forget About It at gunpoint. (In fact, we love it so much that Boatmenblog friend and photoshopper extraordinaire Propane Pete has given us an idea of what it might look like, below.) By this point, that's  pretty much the only way anyone's going to Frank's party...and based on what we've heard, many of them would rather take a bullet than suffer through his lounge act again.

All right, let's get this straight. A couple of months ago, with fans begging him to save the Renegades, Eugene Melnyk proclaimed himself too busy trying to bring the Stanley Cup to Ottawa. Now, he's somehow managed to find the time to buy up pretty much the entire Ontario Hockey League.

Two observations. One, Eugene Melnyk is a jerk. Two, barring somehow convincing Mark Cuban to take the plunge into CFL ownership (which would be the single greatest partnership in the history of professional sports), the future of Canadian football in the nation's capital now comes down to one man. One anthem-singing, juice-peddling, beer-brewing, Ben Johnson-exploiting giant of a man. A man who somehow reminds us of Tony Danza, minus the tap-dancing. Ottawans, meet your saviour. But be warned...he's here for a good time, not a long time.