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The celebrity judges agreed - barely - with the radio talk-show host: Paesano's of Northern Liberties makes the area's best Italian hoagie. The audience of more than 500, however, named a different favorite: Primo Hoagies, with many area locations. Food fans packed the Fox & Hound Pub in King of Prussia on Saturday, as Glen Macnow of WIP-AM (610) emceed a live broadcast of the finale of the Great Hoagie Hunt, his fifth annual food hunt. Macnow tried and rated more than 50 hoagies in two months, then invited his top eight finishers to bring samples for everyone at the event.

"Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult" massacred the Academy Awards weekend box-office competition with a $13.2 million opening gross that was more than double the $5 million collected by second-ranked "Guarding Tess. " The third in the popular "Police Squad" spinoff movies, "Naked Gun 33 1/ 3" opened much bigger than the first, which held up $9.3 million back in December 1988, but not nearly as well as the second, which took in nearly $21 million in June 1991. Another new comedy, "Monkey Trouble," scored $4.5 million to grab third place, and Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," placed in 1,246 theaters to take advantage of its Oscar-favorite status, was fourth with $4.3 million.

After taking a fresh look at a controversial ash heap in Roxborough, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded the ash poses "no imminent and substantial danger" to residents or the environment. But some of the neighbors of the city's Northwest Incinerator yesterday remained unconvinced. "No matter what EPA has to say, the dioxins are there and the heavy metals are there," said Bill Schwartz, president of the Germany Hill Civic Association, "and unless they're stored in a lined landfill, the people are in trouble.

Don't look now, but the city is missing a mountain. The infamous Roxborough mound - last of the city's great ash heaps - has been loaded up and carted away. Its disappearance means that if you drive by the Northwest Incinerator at Domino Lane and Umbria Street, you actually can see more than the top of the stack. "There's no mountain there anymore," said Bill Schwartz, president of the Germany Hill Civic Association, which had sued the city to have the mountain moved.

Coaches usually are the meticulous type. Everything has to be planned to the most minute detail. And they rarely like surprises. Upper Darby gymnastics coach Rich Pagano had one of those few-and-too-far- between pleasant surprises show up in his gym at the beginning of the season: junior transfer Bernadette Woods. "I wasn't sure what I was getting. I didn't know her at all," Pagano said. "I never saw her before she worked out with us for the first time. But then I saw her skill level was pretty high, and she had real good technique.

Loose ball! For those toiling on NFL lines, no words get the adrenaline pumping as rapidly as these two. A loose ball offers unlimited opportunity for men who rarely are more than numbers in a heap, a chance to rise from that obscurity to stardom instantaneously by throwing their body over a football as a brave soldier would give himself up for a land mine. Like that brave soldier, there is a downside, although no one in the NFL yet has died from being caught underneath six or more 280-pound men fighting for the football.

Jason Moore has to rise to the occasion to make a phone call. Moore, who was on his lunch break from the E.F. Moore automobile dealership in Conshohocken, found himself in a heap of difficulty yesterday after his truck broke down at Ridge Avenue and Butler Pike in Plymouth Township.

After packing a ball of snow to proper size along his lawn, Nicholas Sheehan, 7, yesterday gamely tried to lift the chilly chunk atop another, larger ball to make a snowman. But the wet, heavy snow - so perfect for rolling - was too much for the second grader. He lost his grip, and then his balance, and the ball of snow landed in a slushy heap. Undaunted, the boy, who lives on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, said he still had a good mound from which to throw snowballs.

The way to hell can be paved with good intentions - and end in a massive heap of tires. That's what happened when the city and Conrail spent $412,000 to clean up the tracks in Kensington, and left the neighborhood with a tire mountain more than a year ago. "Luckily, nobody has lit those tires up," said George Vera, block captain on Tusculum Street, where homes overlook the heap of at least 2,000 tires. "We're afraid, because of the big fire, we're afraid that is going to happen here," said his wife, Carmen, recalling the tire fire that wrecked a section of Interstate 95 a few weeks ago. Chemical tank cars pass close by the tire heap a couple of times a day on Conrail's Port Richmond branch to the waterfront.

Gone are the Cold War days when the public debate surrounding U.S.-Soviet relations had all the depth of two boys in the schoolyard arguing over whose father would be the victor in a mythical match-up. Now, with the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at hand, it is clear that slowly the debate has moved to higher ground. Public interest in moving the U.S.-Soviet relationship beyond the age of one-dimensional adversaries is evident in the scores of seminars, speeches, cultural exhibits and news conferences planned to feed a hunger for information about the Soviet Union.

In ancient Greece, priests gathered at the Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus, the better to interpret the deity-inspired prophecies of Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. Google, for all its omnipresence, is no deity, yet legions practice search-engine optimization in an effort to divine the secret algorithms that move certain websites to the top of an online search. Now comes candidate optimization , essentially the same idea applied to job seekers, with services that help them tweak their resumés so they end up at the top of a list generated by a company's computerized talent-management system.

Camden Iron & Metal and its heap of crushed scrap at the foot of the Platt Memorial Bridge near the airport are moving to Camden, along with 175 jobs and the promise of 50 hires. The unsightly junkyard of crushed cars and washing machines that is synonymous with 26th Street and Penrose Avenue - the gateway to Philadelphia for millions of visitors - will disappear after the scrap recycler installs, by the end of this year, a modern new shredder at Atlantic and Front Streets in Camden.

HERE'S A THOUGHT for Presidents Day: President Santorum. Did you just shiver? How in the name of all that's holy is Rick Santorum atop national polls for the Republican nomination? Get it? All that's holy? Maybe that's the answer. You know, the Tebow factor; the Jeremy Lin effect? Well, I have another theory. I wrote Rick off after his strong showing in Iowa, a state that - in an example of what a wacky year this is - he officially won weeks later by one-tenth of 1 percent.

The Beyoncé baby brouhaha has so spiraled out of control, it's sucked in New York's Mayor Bloomberg . The p.r. stink bomb went off when civilians complained that B. and hub Jay-Z received such VIP treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital last week for the birth of their daughter, Blue Ivy , that the regular folk weren't able to see their own newborns. Seems an entire wing of the hospital was closed off by Jay-Z's bodyguards. The power couple paid to have the area refurbished a month ago, when workers tore down six to eight rooms and turned them into two suites with mahogany walls, an unnamed source tells Us Weekly.

Justin Rose says Aronimink isn't the kind of layout you can "bully. " He should know. He's the defending champion of the AT & T National, which begins Thursday in Newtown Square. A year ago the Englishman, who turns 31 at the end of July, had just won his first PGA Tour title a month earlier at the Memorial. Then he came here and shot 10-under-par 270 at Aronimink to win by one over hard-charging Ryan Moore (final-round 65). "It's a golf course you can't chase scores on," Rose said on a recent teleconference.

We're taking a break from an action-packed, Memorial Day-weekend Wiffle ball tournament to present you with our rankings of the best middle infielders in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Because the area is filled with top second basemen and shortstops, we've made this a top-20 list. 1. Mike "Zoom" Zolk, Neumann-Goretti, senior. Before Saturday's Catholic League semifinal vs. La Salle, the North Carolina-bound second baseman was batting .721 with 33 RBIs, 29 runs, and 7 home runs.

ARIES (March 21-April 19). You'll be filled with new ambition to be better than you were. Initiate contact with those who can help you. TAURUS (April 20-May 20). It takes effort to put your best look forward. You'll put in the time necessary. Shopping will be involved. GEMINI (May 21-June 21). You have a competitive advantage, but it won't benefit you unless you know what it is. Investigate this now. CANCER (June 22-July 22). You are compassionate and sensible. Your suggestions and needs will be heard and acted upon.

All sorts of neat awards are here! President Obama will confer them Wednesday at the White House. National Medal of Arts? Come on up, poet god Donald Hall and sculptor Mark di Suvero ! You there, Meryl Streep , Van Cliburn , Quincy Jones , Sonny Rollins , and James Taylor ! Hey, Harper Lee ( To Kill a Mockingbird )! National Humanities Medals, anyone? How's about you, authors Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates ? And you, wonderful poet/conservationist Wendell E. Berry ?

THE PROBLEM: If Lauren Hall had the ability to clean up all the trash next to 6401 Glenmore Ave. on her own, she would have done so already. After all, the Southwest Philadelphia resident spent a recent December day collecting needles, used condoms and glass that littered the ground beside the abandoned house. But that's only a fraction of the debris that begins on the private lot and spills out into the adjacent street. On Friday, the trash pile that's been growing for months included the following: two mattresses, two broken recliners, 10 tires, lots of wood with nails sticking out, a rug, the frame of a computer monitor and numerous trash bags filled to the brim.

Fifteen 4-year-olds in rosy satin princess dresses waving wands and wearing sparkling tiaras are a sweet sight, indeed. But it was the three tables laden with candy that catapulted Hilary Whitaker's birthday party to OMG-it's-sugar-heaven status. Next to dozens of glass vases filled with Gummi Bears, Swedish Fish, and saltwater taffy were licorice vines, Starbursts, M&Ms, rock candy necklaces, and three kinds of bubble gum. There were boxes of Nerds, Ring Pops, sheets of Candy Buttons, and rolls of Smarties.