It’s still Summer…for a couple more days. (I just checked and, where I am, 7:05 p.m. on Tuesday, September 22, is the end of the line for Summer 2026.) So why not end with a flourish? Let’s go: here’s what I’m Watching, Reading, Listening to, and Rediscovering this week.
Watching: Widow’s Bay
This sort of thing does happen to me with respect to Matthew Rhys shows: I’m either late to the party or busy with other stuff or otherwise occupied, so I miss the original excitement. Then, his show wins Emmy awards and I am forced to pay attention.
It happened with The Americans — which I’ve written about on these pages when we first started this newsletter (August 2, 2025) — which I consider to be the greatest American television drama ever; and, now that Rhys and his acting cohorts Kate O’Flynn and Stephen Root have all won Emmys, it’s high time I start watching the show.
So I have decided to start watching. No spoilers please. Here’s the trailer.
Also some super-clever marketing from the show via Google; if you search for Widow’s Bay you end up with this.
Reading: Does Your College Football Team Get ROI from its Payroll?
Let’s go back in time to January 2020. The “Before Times” in so many ways. For instance, Joe Burrow was capping off his Heisman Trophy-winning season with 6 Touchdowns in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game. Here, revisit that game. We’ll wait a couple minutes.
Where am I going with this? Well, many people — I am among those people; I bandwagoned with LSU football years ago, pre-Brian Kelly, definitely pre-Lane Kiffin; so this was one of the best seasons ever for me to watch football — maintain that LSU had the greatest college football team ever assembled in 2019. I will go a step farther: LSU had The Last Great COLLEGE Football Team we’ll ever see.
The floodgates opened with (1) Name, Image, and Likeness money allowing for payers to be paid for the use of their…well…name, image, or likeness; (2) the ubiquitous Transfer Portal — players coming and going as they please — meaning it’s possible for a player to play for multiple teams over a “college” career; (3) COVID, which shortened the 2020 season and got players to ask for, and receive, more than the usual five years — that used to be four years of eligibility, but those days changed, too — because the NCAA had long abandoned any sense of amateurism; and (4) an extremely loose definition of NIL (item 1 above) and some really open checkbooks from schools and their boosters.
The Athletic, to which I subscribe, decided to study the numbers behind this new era of college football. Money talks. Your team has to pay to win games.
Here’s a gift link to their article; you can dive as deeply as you’d like into your team, its payroll — SIX YEARS AGO, THAT WAS AN ABSURD THOUGHT — and whether or not your squad’s payroll has paid off.
Listening to: LCD Soundsystem
Here’s another thing I was late to the party with. LCD Soundsystem dates back to 2002 and I can’t believe I haven’t yet written about the band on these pages.
Here are a few bangers from their discography; all of these are live performances because the live performances are pretty cool.
A live performance from Late Show with David Letterman in 2005 (!) of one of the band’s most-popular songs, “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.”
Here’s another live performance: this one’s of the song “Dance Yrself Clean” and it’s recorded from a show in Madison Square Garden.
Finally, here’s “All My Friends,” a song from 2007 that the band performed in 2024 at Glastonbury in the UK. It’s James Murphy, the band’s frontman, in his element.
Rediscovering: The Strange History of Burger Chef
Researching this week’s newsletter has been…interesting. I’ve gone from “Whatever happened to Burger Chef?” to “Wait, Burger Chef was in Mad Men?” to “OMG those murders??? WHAT???”
Video 1 gives you the background. It’s not TOTALLY AI, but has the sound of a Wikipedia page brought to life — Here’s the Burger Chef Wikipedia page, in case you’d rather just read the brand’s history — and a few really good throwback images.
Video 2 is a clip of Peggy on Mad Men pitching the brand. Just under 4 minutes; this Midwestern kid wonders if the Mad Men moment might have been the first introduction the rest of the world had to the chain.
Video 3 tells the story of the Burger Chef Murders, 1978.
The chain was sold to the parent company of Hardee’s in 1982 and most of the remaining stores were converted into Hardee’s restaurants shortly thereafter.
Finally: Billy Parisi Makes a ‘Chopped Cheese’
Since you might be hungry after reading about Burger Chef — and since yesterday was National Cheeseburger Day — let’s enjoy a twist on the sandwich: all the elements of a cheeseburger, but perfected by the New York City bodega into something called a Chopped Cheese.
Make it an amazing weekend, and a great week ahead. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Dave