When you were just a little girl in Pine Bluff, Daddy disappeared without a trace

I've been sneering at the enthusiasm displayed by a couple of other bloggers over Veronica Mars lately. So when I stumbled across it tonight I felt obligated to watch and see what all the fuss is about. It was a pretty good episode, I suppose, but I remain convinced that adults shouldn't blog obsessively about their slightly obscure pop culture fixations.

Oh, the best thing about the episode? The soundtrack closed out with two Old 97's songs.

Addendum: The worst thing was that Kristen Bell is too old for the role. It took me 20 minutes to realize and then accept that yes, she really is supposed to be a high school student. I'll grant she may look a bit younger than her age, which is coincidentally 26 today, but a teenager? Nope.

Update: Since I was too subtle for some, let's do some obsessive Old 97's blogging. The two songs were Four Leaf Clover, the subject of my first nonintroductory post, and the opening bars of which are indistinguishable to me from my hazy recollection of Fleetwood Mac's regrettable Tusk. Indeed, I thought that bizarre selection was what I was hearing; without that shock I probably would have missed the song entirely. In the event, "I ain't got no hope of getting you," was a good lyrical choice for that point in the episode.

I suppose the second song, Adelaide (past title fodder), fit as well, if you had to have some "now he's gone" style moping. But it was absolutely indefensible to have two Old 97's songs in an episode about a kid skipping town with his infant daughter to rescue her from the abusive quasi-inlaws and not use Am I Too Late?

When you were just a little girl in Pine Bluff,
Daddy disappeared without a trace.
Now there's no more little girls in Pine Bluff,
They all ran like tears out of this place.

Sure, the rest is horribly depressing, made worse by being sung in a cheerful, energetic tone, but 90% of Four Leaf Clover was irrelevant, too. They clearly should have rewritten the episode to make it work. I hardly think having the baby die at the end would have been too high a price to make this song work.

Update II: Looking back at that Four Leaf Clover post, I remember being frustrated that these lines weren't true and didn't fit:

I got a lucky silver dollar.
My granddaddy gave it to me now he's dead.

He died less than two weeks later, and one of the several small odd things we subsequently found as part of his estate included a box of silver coins in the attic. Coins from...Mexico, where the VM scene playing this song is set.

Fear me.