There’s a kind of sterile pride you get from watching your friends do well, but it also comes with a bit of anxiety. Of course, we were delighted to see that our regular guest and lunch correspondent Rohan Nadkarni was doing a great job for the NBC Sports Desk newsletter from the Milan Cortina Olympics. Of course, things like interviewing Alysa Liu gave us a sense of accomplishment by association. But there were also whispers of worry that wouldn’t go away. There was a small voice in my head asking, “But is that person over there eating well?” There’s good news.
Be assured that we have “gotten to it.” But Rohan’s return to the podcast after five painful weeks coincided with a very Rohan-specific turn in sports news at the moment. So before we talked about carb content, we talked about Bam Adebayo’s sublime and outrageous 83-point game and the noise surrounding it, how being stranded in this difficult game may or may not help solve the tanking problem, and how the NBA could, but will not, actually improve its product. The Kobe Discourse is considered. I briefly describe what Michael Porter Jr. says about these women. Although it is still on the Rohan side, it was able to attract attention for a while.
And given all that, you might be wondering, “How did Lohan eat in Italy?” You have some qualifications on the topic. Our guy wasn’t really feeling Milanese food and had more room service club sandwiches than he’d hoped for due to work, but he got to experience what blew my mind the most about dining in Italy. That’s basically how incredibly high the floor is for everything you eat. For him, that meant eating unlit focaccia in the media lounge, admiring the spread of All’Antico Vinaio’s sandwiches (now available in the U.S., too!), and eating sandwiches so delicious and large that he couldn’t eat them. And this is the quote: “Sit down and make a low moan.”
It would have been irresponsible to talk about all the lunches Lohan had in Italy without talking about what brought her there. Covering the Olympics turned out to be both a lot of work and a transcendent task. Rohan talked about rebuilding his brain by covering live figure skating competitions, how stressful it is to watch high-level athletics on ice, and how immune Alysa Liu is to that stress. The kebab incident that gave this episode its title and headlined this blog is covered later in the episode, but the two are related. Literally, we couldn’t have one without the other.
Before arriving at Funbag we had a quick look at the others. I celebrated Team USA’s loss to Italy in the World Baseball Classic for the most ridiculous reasons, and the overall thrill of Italian-American excellence beating the Default American. Rohan gave the Dolphins his coveted stamp of approval when they signed Malik Willis. We talked about a groundbreaking experience we had as kids, where we made a small fuss after eating chocolate filled with alcohol. Ultimately, a surprisingly heated debate ensued following Funbag’s question about whether being an orchestra conductor was a “real job.” But it might be more accurate to think of it as a petit four, or a palate-cleansing mint, after the typical eclectic feast prepared by one of our wonderful podcast guests. Rohan was eaten in pods as in Italy.
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