About halfway through this week's episode, returning champion guest Rohan Nadkarni asked a question I didn't really know how to answer. We'd spent the first half talking about the NBA, which I enjoyed, and per the pre-show rundown the idea was to get back to it for a while in the second half before things kind of inexorably move in the direction of "talking about fried appetizers," in the way they always do on Rohan episodes. But before we could do that, Rohan asked why it is that we still feel compelled to do the sports talk at all when we could very easily justify doing an entire hour on foods we have enjoyed, with a couple of Funbag questions stuck on at the end. It wasn't a gag, or anyway it wasn't just a gag. It's a good question.
The short answer is that Drew and I both like talking about sports, and maybe also some residual loyalty to the pod's roots. But the longer answer, during one of the slower weeks in the sports schedule, is a more complicated one. It's fun to talk about the NBA with Rohan, who knows a lot and also has some earnestly held and truly wild opinions, and I enjoyed doing that here. It's fun to talk about the Cleveland Cavaliers, both as a team playing an unusual and effective style of basketball and as a Collection Of Guys, and I enjoyed doing it. It is sort of fun and sort of harrowing to talk about whatever it is that makes Tom Thibodeau coach and be the way he is, and to discuss the ways in which he has and hasn't grown during his reliably distressed tenure as a NBA head coach, and I enjoyed that, too. Talking about the Oklahoma City Thunder's team defense is basically the most fun I could have in a work-related context at this time of year. This was not dry tape-grinding, either, the proof being all the room left for a decently lengthy Paddington-related digression from Rohan and a Kevin Knox–related detour. And yet.
And yet it is cold outside, and halfway through the NBA season, and none of us know enough about hockey to fake it on the 4 Nations Face-Off thing, so why shouldn't we talk about sandwiches for an hour? The back half of the show serves as a sort of preview of what that might be like—a sort of open-faced, melt-style rundown of various lunch-related stuff we are thinking about. We began that with a fairly in-depth consideration of a bit of sandwich avant-gardism from Drew's son, who constructed an experimental hash brown and avocado double-down sandwich. I ran down my personal hierarchy of Italian-style sandwiches for what is surely the first time ever on the pod, and we addressed the worrying extent to which Italian-American aesthetics do not necessarily guarantee a high-quality Italian-American sandwich experience and the lamentable extent to which dreary reactionary political signifiers in a deli do correlate with a high-quality sandwich experience. I want to clarify that this doesn't mean that I want to eat a sandwich from a place with a Blue Lives Matter decal in the window. It just means that I will have high expectations if I do.
And we kept going in that vein. Rohan delivered an ode to the one sandwich on offer at Roma Deli—a friend has already texted me to clarify that this is in fact in Pasadena, not Glendale; no one ever texts me about my NFL-related flubs—and all three of us agreed on the importance of simplicity in a sandwich. A discussion of my wife's life-changing Italian sandwich experience on our honeymoon somehow led into a brief public health breakdown on my part and Rohan explaining his evolving and seemingly quite complex parasocial relationship with an Italian chef in Canada. An online relationship that began with a morbid obsession with that chef's cream-sauce fetish led to genuine admiration and seems likely to lead, in time, to a reservation at Resto Vivaldi.
There was still the matter of the Funbag. There we considered whether Drake is now the most extravagantly publicly owned individual in history; Rohan described his experience at the Super Bowl, where he heard an entire football stadium sing "A minor" together in a sort of feral ecstasy. That might have been a nice place to end, but I wanted to know about some stuff that Rohan ate in New Orleans, which is why I have had the image of a Pittsburgh-style steak with fried oysters on top in my head for two days now. As it happened, one of the last things you hear in the episode is Rohan repeating a cabdriver's suggestion that "you want that sandwich sloppy." A whole hour of that sort of thing would be a lot. But as a coda for this one, that sure fits.
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