Vacation, all I ever wanted

I wound up taking a vacation day today, because I was up until just past 4:00 AM last night watching the HBO Original series "Deadwood," which was two hours longer than I should have and four hours shorter than I would have, but I wasn't sure if there would be vacation time available today. If I'd known there would have been available vacation time I would have just stayed up all night and finished the first season of "Deadwood" before bedtime. When I woke up at 10:00 AM to go to work I'd only been asleep for four and a half hours and that's just not enough sleep one needs in order to face the half-witted reprobates that don't pay their cell phone bills on time. And also, there were the last four episodes of "Deadwood" that needed watching. And if this paragraph is hard to read, it's because I've spent the last 12 waking hours staring at this computer screen, watching "Deadwood" and as a result, my brain has turned to shit. And if you haven't figured out the point of this paragraph yet, it's that you should be watching "Deadwood." And if you've already been watching "Deadwood" and you hadn't told me how awesome it was, you're a cocksucker. Season two is currently on its way, so there's the weekend.

As to Ron's thought-provoking question, I pondered it for a few days. It was hard to come to a conclusion, because very few bands have a great song that you would use to convert new fans with that is simultaneously overlooked. I realize that wasn't the exact question, but for that reason the answer becomes too easy. I suppose it's "too easy" in the sense of being a music elitist and wanting to pull some obscure answer out of my ass, like referring to some unheralded song from an album that didn't make much noise, like "Go Let it Out" from Oasis' last mainstream gasp "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants" or such. But, when the answer is whittled down to the bare bones, my favorite band is Nirvana. And I recently downloaded a bootlegged live show from Chicago in October of 1991, just before the dam broke on their success. I was listening to it in the car Sunday night and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on; those four chords like a bolt of lightning and those drums pounding like the thunder behind it, and yeah, that's the song I'd evangelize with.

In second place, the semi-elitist obscure choice of Pearl Jam's "Yellow Ledbetter."

And finally, for those of you that remember the classic 1998 environmental PSA "Tennessee Trash," I recently acquired a copy of it on VHS and will be encoding it into digital format this weekend along with the 1978 original. If anyone wants a copy, let me know and I'll see what I can work out.