Suspiciously Familiar Material

Outta Leftfield: Hokey hoagie idea turns into the ‘Great Gondola Caper of 2011’
Published: Wednesday, March 30, 2011
By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor

If you read his earlier post on this same topic, you know he's going to reference his friends in Illinois who are on the radio. Borsch thinks it's really, really neat that he knows a couple guys who have their own radio show. I bet he hates the fact that their show is immediately followed by Glenn Beck.

Only a real pal would suppress his fears about poisoning me long enough to FedEx some sandwiches across the country, timed perfectly to arrive just before lunch.

Unlike 99% of his posts, this idea actually has the potential to be amusing. Let's see how badly he blows it.

But for my boyhood friend Greg Batton, something like that is right in his wheelhouse. Not the poisoning part, the sandwich part. And that’s how the “Great Gondola Caper of 2011” was launched.

Couldn't have said "that's his forte" or anything - had to work in that baseball reference.

Greg is a radio personality at WMBD in Peoria, Ill. (www.1470wmbd.com). He and his partner, Dan Diorio, have been the morning jocks there for years, and they like to have a lot of fun, mostly because they’re still a little punchy from having to get up so dadgummed early in the morning. I like to have fun, too, but our geographic realities usually prevent Greg from trying to poison me in person more than once every couple of years.

Wow, they're morning radio personalities? You don't say so. I'm equally shocked that he worked in a reference to his boyhood in Illinois. Credit due - the "poison me in person" bit is good.

Recently, Greg and Dan were involved with a promotion by the Peoria Chiefs, the Class A minor league affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. The Chiefs are conducting an online voting contest to see which central Illinois media personality would have his or her likeness on a bobblehead, which would be given away to fans at a game in August.

Repeated material from the earlier "Bobblehead Immortality" blog post.

Greg asked me to reach out to my friends here in the Philly area via Facebook, Twitter and my blog and ask them to go to the Chiefs’ website and vote for him and Dan, which I did as detailed in a blog item here: http://outtaleftfieldblog.blogspot.com.

Do not visit the blog. If you read the previous two paragraphs of the current column, you'll have the whole story.

It just so happens that Greg’s request coincided with the fact that I haven’t been home in a few years and was craving a gondola from Avanti’s, an eatery in the Peoria area. A gondola is what my dear friend, L. Kramier Tahtay — which I think is French Canadian for, “Hey, pass me the mustard!” — calls a “sammich.” The word “sammich” in my circle of friends is what one says when stuffing a really, really, really, really good sandwich into one’s mouth and then trying to say the word “sandwich.”

And we're still repeating material from the blog post. Mr. Tahtay must actually be a personal friend of Borsch who, I assume, doesn't mind his penchant for mocking foreign names. I would also like to point out that "sammich" would be impossible to say while stuffing anything in your mouth, since the "M" sound requires you to close your lips. "Sawwich" would be more like it. "Sammich" is just something dumb people say.

Of course, not all sandwiches are sammiches.

By his own definition, it isn't a "sammich" unless you're jamming it into your mouth. Sort of like the meteor/meteorite distinction. Are we really going to delve into this?

The gondola in Peoria is a simple sammich, with ham, salami and cheese (lettuce and tomato, if you prefer, which I don’t). It’s similar to what we would call a hoagie here in Philly. The difference usually is the bread, and this is where Avanti’s holds an advantage in my view. It’s fresh and sweet, and I wouldn’t have any trouble eating it every day.

Frankly, saying "I could eat it every day" isn't a big compliment to pay to bread. We don't make any fresh, sweet bread here in Philly?

It doesn’t even need any condiments. (By the way, I’ve found the best breads around here at Conshohocken Bakery in Conshy and Silvio’s Deli in Hatboro, which come very, very close to achieving official “sammich” designation.)

Shameless Promotion Alert? And exactly what is so good it doesn't need condiments - the bread? Who puts condiments on plain bread?

Greg and I have been frequenting Avanti’s since we were in high school, usually after football or basketball games. The smell of the bread reminds me of a lot about home, and all of this was going through my mind about the time Greg made his request for help with the bobblehead promotion.

“I’ll help you out with the online voting if you mail me a couple of gondolas,” I said to him.

This has already been established. We had an entire blog post about it. The only new info we have is how good the bread is.

The two of us have been down a similar path before. A few years ago, he had put out a call to his Facebook friends that he wanted to do something nice for someone. I just happened to be headed to New York for a ballgame the next day and wrote to him that “he could buy me a hotdog tomorrow at Yankee Stadium.”

Crazy radio guys love stuff like that.

This is almost word-for-word from the blog post. Is this story like a DVD extra - "Bobblehead Blog - Cut Scenes"?

I didn’t really expect him in Peoria to buy me a hotdog in New York, but I knew he’d pull out all the stops trying. (He couldn’t make it happen at Yankee Stadium, but I did receive a dozen hotdogs from him a few days later at my office.)

Aaaaaand we're still repeating stuff from the blog. The column is almost over at this point, and the only new info we have is what a "sammich" is.

Last Thursday, I got the text message from Greg that I had been waiting for: “You’ll be eating tomorrow.” He followed that up by texting, “Please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die!”

I don't know about you, but I'd be freaked out to receive texts like that. It's like one of those Japanese horror movies.

Oh boy. All Friday morning, I was waiting for the sammiches to arrive, which they did right before lunch, in a FedEx box. Two of them. I had no idea FedEx would ship sammiches. In fact, I think the company ought to include Greg and me in its next advertising campaign. I could travel to exotic locations and Greg could FedEx me gondolas overnight for the next day’s lunch. The company could change its slogan to, “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight and ready for Mike’s lunch the next day.”

These days, sandwich mascots are famous for losing weight by eating them. Borsch doesn't exactly fit with that crowd.

It will come as no surprise that after tearing open the FedEx box and getting a whiff of the bread, I scarfed one whole gondola for lunch the day it arrived — it was truly a Caligula-inspired act of overindulgence. And there was a real concern among my central Illinois friends that the backup sammich would survive the rest of the day.

I'm surprised he didn't suggest that Caligula was, like, a backup shortstop for the Expos or something.

But not being in tip-top gondola-eating shape, the first one sat kind of heavily in my system.

This probably means he dropped a massive, meaty load shortly after eating it.

I had to wait two days to tackle the second one, which I did for breakfast Sunday morning. After being shipped in a Fed Ex box halfway across the country, then sitting in the refrigerator for two days, it had become less than it’s stellar self, but still good enough for breakfast fare.

He ate a sandwich comprised of ham, salami and cheese... for breakfast? Disgusting.

As it turns out, the Philly influence wasn’t enough to get Greg and Dan through the second round of the bobblehead promotion, which spares the central Illinois folks from of freaky image of seeing Greg’s face on one side of a bobblehead and Dan’s on the other. Two faces on the same bobblehead? No thanks.

Shocking - Borsch's legion of fans wasn't enough to sway the vote?

From my perspective, however, the Great Gondola Caper of 2011 was a success. I didn’t get food poisoning. Maybe FedEx will want to work that into the ad campaign.

They sent something via FedEx, and it arrived. What a caper! Maybe I should write a story about the Great Amazon.com Used Book 3rd Party Seller Caper of 2011. And didn't we already have a "use us in an ad campaign" joke? Now he's repeating material from the same column!