Hermes' line about the cigar raising further questions might actually be my favorite in all of Futurama.

I feel like anything common enough to have a TV Tropes entry probably shouldn't make it as an AV Club Inventory.

Exactly! You know which songs end with a key change? Nearly every damn country song from the 1950s and 60s! Modulating up a half step or a whole step does not make something epic.
But I will admit to being a sucked for the key change in "Massive Nights."

I was given that album as a Christmas present about three weeks after my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer (he recovered). I cannot listen to that song without bawling.

I think the book Don was reading was Bernand Malmud's The Fixer, published in 1966. Wikipedia also seems to think so.

Does Akroyd have some kind of gambling debt that needs to be paid?