The Driver’s Cut
Kiffin’s first Saturday
- 911 Carrera S, six-speed
- Elsie’s, then BoDeans
- Blancpain Bathyscaphe 70th
- Cayenne demos
- Brakes, parts, Porsche Design
September doesn’t cool Baton Rouge so much as it stops actively working against you. The asphalt lets go of the day a little earlier now, the light quits at a reasonable hour, and a car built to be driven finally gets the road it was waiting for.
Here’s what’s news.
On Saturday
Kiffin’s first Saturday
Tiger Stadium · Baton Rouge
On Saturday
Kiffin’s first Saturday
Clemson comes to Tiger Stadium Saturday, 6:30 Central, ABC, with GameDay parked on the quad. LSU sits 0–0, eleventh in the AP, thirteenth in the coaches’ poll, and none of that means anything yet. Lane Kiffin has never coached a snap here. Saturday he does, against a team good enough to make the first answer honest.
Then there is the part that happened in a courtroom. Thursday night, Baton Rouge judge William Jorden signed a preliminary injunction: the NCAA and SEC can’t punish a school for putting certain former NFL players — the ones named in the suit — on the field. Two of them followed Kiffin from Ole Miss. Dae’Quan Wright practiced twice this week and said he wants Clemson; Zxavian Harris needs a couple weeks and has circled Ole Miss on the 19th. The SEC, meanwhile, sued LSU in U.S. District Court in Alabama — the school, the board, president Wade Rousse, AD Verge Ausberry, Kiffin himself — over the intent to play them. Dabo Swinney called the whole chase “embarrassing.”
After Clemson: Louisiana Tech at home the 12th, then Ole Miss in Oxford on the 19th, then Texas A&M back in Baton Rouge on the 26th.
Photo: WClarke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Reporting: ESPN, Dan Murphy, Mark Schlabach, David Hale.
On the Road
America keeps the third pedal
2027 911 Carrera S MT · Porsche
America keeps the third pedal
Here is the honest 911 this fall, and it is not a hundred-car Alpine special you will read about and never see. It is a 2027 Carrera S with a six-speed manual bolted into the middle of the cabin, and Porsche is selling it here.
Rear-wheel drive only. The 3.0-liter twin-turbo flat-six, 473 horsepower, and three pedals under your feet — no hybrid weight, no paddle shuffle. It is a North America exclusive, which almost never runs in our favor and this time does.
The GT3 Touring take rate on the stick ran eighty percent. That is not nostalgia. That is a market telling the factory what it actually wants, and the S got a manual because of it. Porsche’s line, roughly: they’ll keep building the third pedal until the law or the order book kills it. The hybrid GTS and Turbo still don’t offer one. That tells you which car in the range is the driver’s car.
On the Table
Pot Pie or Pecan Pie
Elsie’s Plate & Pie · Mid City
Pot Pie or Pecan Pie
Paul Chauvin Dupré named the place for his grandmother. Elsie Marie Campeau Rupe, out of Lockport, down in Lafourche where the water gets into everything — the cooking, the names, the way people talk about a meal three days after they ate it. That is the whole thesis of Elsie’s Plate & Pie.
Order like you mean it. The seafood pot pie, because a pot pie built by someone from bayou country is a different animal than the frozen-aisle memory you’re carrying. The seafood Lafourche bisque. And a slice of pie, boxed, to take home — the move of a person who plans ahead and regrets nothing. Two people. No laptops.
OpenTable will not book you here. Call the house — (225) 636-5157 — or start at the site. Old-fashioned, and it works.
On the Town
BoDeans, September 16
BoDeans · Manship Theatre, 16 September
BoDeans, September 16
Forty years ago the BoDeans put out Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams and spent the next four decades proving heartland rock was never a phase. Wednesday, September 16, they play the whole thing at the Manship Theatre, 7:30. Tickets start at $36 with fees — buy them from the theatre and nowhere else.
Manship is the right room for it: seated, honest acoustics, no bad sightline. A midweek night that asks nothing of you except that you actually listen.
Photos via Manship Theatre
- Sun 6 First Free Sunday at LASM. Reflections: The Art of George Rodrigue, through Jan 24. No admission. lasm.org
- Tue 8 Band of Heathens, Manship, 7:30. From $72.24. Austin roots-rock, twenty years in. Tickets
- Sun 13 Concert Kitchen Live: Kevin Belton and John Papa Gros, Manship, 2 p.m. From $35. Show
- Sun 20 The Wild Pour, BREC Zoo, 2:30–5:30. 21+. Tickets
On the Wrist
Blancpain goes small on purpose
Bathyscaphe 70th · ref. 5903 1110 63A
Blancpain goes small on purpose
The Fifty Fathoms is where the modern dive watch starts — 1953, the actual origin, not a marketing claim. For the 70th, Blancpain didn’t chase size. It shrank the Bathyscaphe to 37.4 mm and built 300 of them. The restraint is the point.
Steel, 37.4 mm, 12.3 mm thick, 46.5 mm lug to lug. Sapphire front and back, ceramic bezel, 300 meters. Sunburst meteor grey dial, vintage Blancpain logo, 18k white gold baton hands, vintage-toned Super-LumiNova. It reads like 1968 without cosplaying it.
Turn it over: manufacture caliber 1150, 100-hour reserve, silicon hairspring, 3 Hz, open-worked 18k gold rotor from the ’53 Fifty Fathoms. Chocolate calf. $18,300. Available now. Three hundred people get one.
On the Lot
Cayenne Executive Demos
Cayenne · Harris Porsche
Cayenne Executive Demos
Up to $12,500 off. Three to choose from.
Macan GTS
$1,699/mo · 39 months · $10,000 due at signing. Welcome to Porsche Credit included.
Side note: a 2023 Panamera Turbo S, GT-silver over black chalk, CPO, $143,493.75. Not a special. Just sitting there being tempting. Approved credit; tax, title and fees extra.
On the Workbench
The shop, and the parts counter
Service · Harris Porsche
The shop, and the parts counter
A 911 is only as honest as the parts that stop it. $150 off a complete Porsche brake job — genuine Porsche components, not a corner-shop pad. Free alignment check with any scheduled service (no centerlock wheels). $30 off a Porsche brake flush, because old fluid pulls water and fades under heat.
Porsche Design · in-stock only
Half off the watches in the case
Porsche Design did not borrow a logo and slap it on a dial. Ferdinand Alexander Porsche built the Chronograph I in 1972 to read like a 911 cockpit — matte black, high contrast, no jewelry. Fifty percent off the timepieces actually sitting at Harris. In-stock only. Not a catalog sale.
Ten percent off Porsche Lifestyle while you’re at the counter — apparel and the rest of the collection. The watches are the reason to walk over.