Country Music Taught Me That Stockholm Syndrome Is Real

My musical tastes went down quite a path as I grew up. My first tape (yeah, I had tapes) was MC Hammer. After that, Weird Al reigned supreme. Then I became a big Def Leppard fan, and then settled in like many angsty teenagers with Metallica and various other metal groups. 

But I'm from Iowa. And in Iowa, one type of music reigns supreme. That music is country music. Since I was inundated with country music every time I did any sort of social activity, I rebelled against and hated it. But eventually it beat me down. It grew on me, some would say like a rash, but it grew on me nonetheless. I actually began to like the stuff, like, it became my go-to music choice. I even defended it to people who didn't like it. "It's a lot better than you think...They sing about fighting...It's not all about dogs and guns."

This lasted for a decade. A full decade of listening to country music. Man, if only I could get those years back. 

But after a decade, I got married, and more importantly, I moved to Florida. Now Florida is just as much of a white trash haven as Iowa, but luckily, I didn't have friends. And not having friends meant that I could always choose what I wanted to listen to. As time went on, that became less and less country music. It went that way because country music is garbage, and my brain now understood that.

It was very freeing. I started to listen to good music like The Sheepdogs, The Struts, The Record Company, and Run the Jewels. You know, legitimately good music. I didn't even know how evil my country music captors were until becoming free for a while and realizing how good music (and life) could truly be.

Life is short. Far too short to listen to country music. I know it's scary to find new music out there, but trust me, there is music that you will truly enjoy listening to. I did it, and you can do it too. I promise.

My Best (And Worst) Sports Predictions

I've really got nothing important to write about today, so I decided to take a trip down memory lane and figure out my hits and misses for sports predictions over the last year.

The Good:
When having my fantasy baseball draft, I predicted the following people were terrible picks:  Jacoby Ellsbury, Aramis Ramirez, Brian Roberts, Ben Zobrist, Michael Young, Derrek Lee, and Nolan Reimold.

When Baseball America ranked Alcides Escobar the #12 prospect in baseball, I called him the most overrated prospect on their list.  I don't care if some say that you shouldn't judge a prospect by his first year in the pros.  I'm like the immature cheese in that commercial (Cheese-It, I believe), la la la can't hear you.  LA LA LA, CAN'T HEAR YOU.

I liked Mike Trout more than Baseball America.  This is one I feel very good about since he's probably one of the top 3 prospects in all of baseball now.  Suck on that, BA.

I knew that Andrew Luck was really good, and Jake Locker was really bad.  Does that count?  It doesn't?  Fair enough, but I'm still keeping it up there.  By the way, although I never blogged it, I told everyone I talked to that Andrew Luck would come back for another year of school.

I predicted that if Jay Cutler could succeed under any coach, that coach would be Mike Martz.

I told anyone who would listen that Chester Taylor sucks.  Recently, Football Outsiders released their list of worst running backs according to advanced metrics, and Chester Taylor was the second worst running back in the NFL, right behind Lawrence Maroney.  Nice job, Chester.

The Bad:
When having my fantasy baseball draft, I predicted the following people were great picks:   Justin Upton, Grady Sizemore, BJ Upton (I LOVE me some Uptons), and Gordon Beckham.
I also said that drafting Ubaldo Jimenez in the 7th round was inexcusable (to be fair, I said it was inexcusable because Tommy Hanson and Clayton Kershaw were still on the board, so I'm still a jackass, just not a total jackass).  

When Starlin Castro was rated the #16 prospect in all of baseball, I called him the second most overrated prospect in baseball.  Now the real question is whether I will root for his success since he plays for the Cubs, or root for his downfall so I can look smart.  Cubs will suck either way, so probably the latter.

Proving that I have no business judging Cubs prospects, I thought Vitters should be ranked in the Top 40 when he was ranked at 70.  He proceeded to shit himself for an entire season.  How can he be bad?  His swing is so pretty, but he does like to show it off by swinging at every pitch imaginable.

I wrote an entire post on whether Jordan's Bulls could beat LeBron's Bulls, since, you know, LeBron was definitely going to Chicago.  Whoops.  The good news is that I picked Jordan's Bulls to win.

I advocated for the Bears signing John David Booty multiple times.  The worst part about predicting his greatness is that I still stand by it.   With his lineage, there is nothing that should hold him back:

I predicted a team to win the national championship.  That team lost five games.  We do not need to go into what team I am referring to.

-Joe

P.S.  This is the most dedicated tribute band in the world:  Of course it's a Def Leppard tribute band: