Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A GOOD LAUGH THAT'S BEEN BREWING FOR MONTHS

With all apologies to that dead Brit he's probably never heard of, the Ex-Beer Baron is finding out who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Personally, the B.B. and his forever-on-the-outs relationship with reality has been a dead issue for a couple months. In all honesty, the response was to chuckle and go, "Oh, yeah, the guy who sued me for $2 million," yesterday when e-mails and Facebook messages started to trickle in, each one a variation on, "This must make your week."

Not really. It was like something that happened back in university, not within the past nine months. The Sager who concerned himself with little people who are beyond education and embarrassment doesn't write here anymore, or at least not as often.

The not-so-humble feeling is that maybe the shitwinds started blowing when the man sent his legal eagles after lil' ol' Out of Left Field last winter. Please forgive the ego trip, but after putting up with the B.B.'s for the past couple years, it's well-earned. The point here is that standing up to the man's bullying for as long as possible helped get us here.

Who knows, maybe it brought about -- take it away, Percy Bysshe -- "the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion."

What is for certain is that post-lawsuit, post-sexual assault charge, public opinion of him certainly hardened. Who knows, it might have got the public palate whetted for the truths hard-working journalists have unearthed about the man and his business interests. That's the story, and I'm sticking to it.

He messed with the wrong man. That stocky, slow-witted balding guy (me) is now laughing to beat the fucking band.

Now he can go on believing and saying, nonsense like, "This tongue has no bones, but it can break 'em," for the rest of his days. That's Frank D'Angelo's right, and I could give a shit. Living well and not caring about what he does, or where he turns up, seems like the best revenge. Good luck, Frank. You'll need it more than I will.

Related:
Steelback in 'liquidity crisis' (Tony Van Alphen, Toronto Star)
D'Angelo's fortunes fading fast (Jennifer Wells, Toronto Star)
In rejecting D'Angelo's bid for Ottawa franchise, CFL came out a winner (Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen)
Ad overspending forces Steelback into protection (Andy Hoffman, reportonbusiness.com)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What always surprised me was the fact that Jeff Hunt, a guy with otherwise very sound judgement, got caught up with Frank. Then again, plenty of good people have been taken in by flim-flam artists.

The sad part of all this is that Steelback's demise was so predictable. If Frank had done an ounce of research, he would have discovered that this is the way it has gone for every last brewery that has tried to take on the "big two" in recent years in the mainstream beer market. They end up spending so much money trying to buy name recognition and market share that they eventually have to give up, either going under or being bought by Labatt or Molson.

Anonymous said...

Hey! I thought tha the "Bank of Frank" wasn't "short of money"? Good thing we've got the Steelback Centre! http://archive.ottawabusinessjournal.com/archive_detail.php?archiveFile=./pubfiles/obj/archive/2007/August/31/OBJ-LocalBusiness/21710.xml&start=0&numPer=20&keyword=d%5C%27angelo§ionSearch=&begindate=1%2F1%2F1999&enddate=12%2F31%2F2007&authorSearch=&IncludeStories=1&pubsection=&page=&IncludePages=1&IncludeImages=1&mode=allwords&archive_pubname=OBJ-Print%0A%09%09%09

Anonymous said...

Well, technically it wasn't short of money, provided Dr. Sherman was making regular deposits. :-) Now that its only customer has taken his business elsewhere, though, the Bank of Frank is looking more like an Argentinian bank than a Canadian one.

Seriously, though, it makes this Butler guy, whoever the heck he is, and his proposal look like even more of a joke than it already was. If a group of people as clueless as the CFL Board of Governors knew Frank was a flim-flam artist, then EVERYONE should have known.