Did you know that my mother’s detective skills rival those of the goddamned Batman?

No, this post will not contain a crudely Photoshopped image of Mom wearing Batman’s cowl.

I’m not exaggerating. While many of my peers tell tales of how they cleverly pulled the wool over their parents’ eyes as kids, or otherwise accomplished feats that would surely earn them a beating if they ever got caught, my brother and I couldn’t get away with shit in our family. My father did his due diligence as the patriarchal authority figure, but when it came to discovering that seemingly meaningless minutiae were out of my place, my mother saw right through our bullshit schemes.

Part of it may be due to her lifetime career as a nurse. (Which threw the old “I’m too sick to go to school” trick right out the window.) Anyone who works in a medical profession needs to pay attention to detail, and nurses are right up there with doctors in that regard. This experience coupled with the natural superpowers women seem to gain after they have children made for a formidable obstacle, indeed.

I know that kids are a superstitious and cowardly lot, but cripes, some of our mother’s perceptions were borderline paranormal. Even if my brother and I skillfully extracted a cookie or two from the back side of the cookie jar, disturbing none of the rest, our mother noticed without even looking. Cripes, if she was on NCIS or CSI, the show would be over in thirty seconds.

My brother loves to rag on our mother for this stuff. When he drops by for a visit, he’ll often shift the bathroom scale or a picture frame a fraction of an inch…and our mother notices every single time. My brother has even done hilarious impressions of Christian Bale’s Batman saying some of Mom’s phrases. Comedy gold! (She doesn’t find it nearly as funny as we do.)

I suppose it’s entirely possible that Mom goes out and fights crime all night. But with her decades of medical experience, I’m hesitant to ask.

More talk about metal! Today’s subject is Metallica’s 1991 album Metallica, popularly known as “the black album.”

Back when it was first released, I had it on cassette, and listened to it so much that I wore it out. I even bought all of the cassette singles, as they had kickass B-side covers of songs like Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy.” When I bought my first CD player in 1992, I got the black album from the library and renewed it constantly until I could afford to buy my own copy. (Hey, CDs were expensive back then!) Even though the band fell out of my favor in the late 1990s, the black album has remained the Metallica record I’ve listened to the most.

The black album was considered by the music press to reflect a more “mainstream metal” sound, but it didn’t bug me. Even though it was a slight shift away from the hard-driving thrash found on the previous four records, the record still had some serious fucking barnburners. My favorites included “Holier Than Thou,” “The Unforgiven,” and “The Struggle Within,” though it’s really hard to choose. Every damned track was awesome, if you ask me. I could do a track-by-track breakdown, but I don’t want to bore you. (I’m sure I do enough of that already.) Suffice it to say that I listened to the black album so damned much that every single riff on the black album is ingrained into my psyche like a stone carving. It’s very possible I’ve played this record more than any other, regardless of genre.

Even with metal on its way out of the mainstream in the early 1990s, Metallica was the one band that metalheads universally loved. As with other forms of rock and roll, there were always metal fans that only stuck with underground bands, claiming any band with some semblance of success was automatically a “sellout.” Metallica was a huge exception; I didn’t know a single headbanger that hated ‘em.

That is, of course, until Load showed up. Like every other metalhead on the face of the planet, I was stoked at the thought of a new Metallica record after the spectacle of the black album, and I actually cut class to run out and buy Load on release day.

Oh, if only I had known.

Saying I was disappointed is putting it lightly; I was fucking pissed. Yes, I was one of those kids who dubbed them “Alternica.” Load and its equally crappy followup Reload seriously dampened my fandom, and after the Napster debacle a few years later, I wrote Metallica off completely for a while. Yes, piracy is wrong, but that’s no excuse to insult your fans, which is exactly what some of the band members did. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield were such arrogant douchebags for a while that I couldn’t even stomach Metallica’s older material!

Even fans who stuck with Metallica through the Load and Reload era are hard-pressed to defend the abominable St. Anger. Metallica’s most recent album Death Magnetic was a marked improvement, but the poor production and awful vocals are still a far cry from what the band was once capable of.

As with most things, my stance on the Load era has softened with time. Even though most of those songs were just godawful, I’m no longer filled with rage over Metallica’s fall from grace; I just ignore their post-black album material, as I do with plenty of other bands’ less than stellar offerings.

Holy shit, I went off on a tangent. Let’s bring things back to the point. For whatever reason, I’ve been listening to the black album a lot lately. The songs still hold up, and brought back many memories of just losing myself in the riffs during my early teenage years. I remember watching the many videos from the album on MTV at the time; it’s strange to think that the bandmembers were younger at the time than I am now!

Strangely enough, I’ve heard a lot of retrospective black album bashing over the past ten years. Maybe it’s because post-black album Metallica has fallen so far, but I still don’t get it. The old stuff still stands the test of time. Speaking of which, the black album turned twenty this year, so it’s yet another thing that makes me feel old. Damn it!

I’ve spoken at length about my affinity for metal, and briefly mentioned that industrial metal was one of my favorite subgenres in the 1990s. Since I’ve got nothing better to do right now, I’m going to ramble about my experiences with it.

Industrial metal exploded during that decade, and I sopped that shit up like a sponge. Skrew, Drown, Godflesh, Fear Factory, Sundown, Monster Voodoo Machine, Ministry, Rammstein, Treponem Pal, Pitchshifter, Snake River Conspiracy…you name it, I probably listened to it.

I’m guessing that the sound of industrial metal appealed me because I’ve always been a science fiction fan. The mechanical themes mixed with my preferred form of rock and roll was just a natural match. Grinding steel mixed with shredding guitars, distorted vocals, and oppressive piledriver beats? I was all over that shit like white on rice. Nine Inch Nails’ Broken was my gateway drug into the scene, and it remains some of the best material the style has to offer.

In the latter half of the 1990s, I fell out of the scene a bit. Although it was cool when other metal bands I was into experimented with industrial stylings (like Moonspell’s Sin/Pecado), much of the scene had moved more towards alternative rock and nu-metal. Some of it was okay, like Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, and early works from Rob Zombie, Static-X, and Powerman 5000. My interest in these bands evaporated quickly, though, as too much of their material got too repetitive or they rapidly changed styles to keep up with current trends. It was guilty pleasure music at best.

I’ve since taken to listening to some of the old stuff from the 1990s again, and holy crow, a lot of that shit’s horrible. It definitely hasn’t aged well at all. It didn’t seem to matter to me at the time, but cripes, what was I thinking? My only excuse is that I was young and stupid.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s any good industrial metal bands left out there; got any recommendations? You know how picky my tastes are nowadays.

(I should tell you that on a completely unrelated note, there’s a secret hidden in this post. See if you can find it!)

Most people tend to save their important mementos by cluttering up their shelves or other living spaces, or they sadly trash them.

I take a slightly different approach: I store my nostalgia items in what I lamely call “memory boxes.” I guess you could also call them time capsules: the first one covers my childhood up through eighth grade, the second box covers high school, and the third covers college. (I’ve been thinking about a fourth that would cover the first decade post-college, but I’m not sure if I’ll go through with it yet.) Right now, they’re all large cardboard packing boxes, but I plan to replace them with more durable plastic crates in the future.

All manner of objects can be found inside, from toys to books to articles of clothing. The name of these containers describes their function quite accurately, as aside from storage, they help me remember things from decades past. For example, the childhood and high school boxes contain yearbooks that help fill in the gaps when it comes to my school years. The college one has all of my old sketchbooks.

Once in a great while, I’ll open one up and sift through the contents within. Especially in the case of the childhood and high school boxes, there were objects in there I’d completely forgotten about. Granted, many of the associated memories are not pleasant (especially in the case of the yearbooks), but they still helped define who I am.

I have destroyed some nostalgic items in the past, due to either space concerns or those bad memories, and I’ve later regretted it. Much of that stuff is irreplaceable, but in the case of books or other mass-produced items, I’ve sometimes bought new copies to put back in the box. It may not be the exact copy I had way back when, but it’s close enough.

I’ve recently begun shifting more of my books and a few duplicate comics into the memory boxes; I’ve either reread them recently, or don’t plan to again for many years, if at all. Still, I maintain a sentimental attachment to them, so I’m not going to throw them out. It also helps to consolidate a lot of my old crap.

It’ll be more interesting to go through this stuff when I’m in my eighties…assuming that I can still remember where I put them.

Much ado has been made about the new Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. Both are designed to steal some of the iPad’s thunder, and I can’t blame Amazon or Barnes & Noble for wanting to get in on that action.

However, there’s a serious problem with these new tablets, and I’m not talking about the usual technical glitches, incompatibilities, and so forth often seen in major hardware revisions. The big issue is one of privacy.

The Kindle Fire’s Silk browser uses Amazon’s cloud servers to speed up website rendering and performance. This means that all web traffic on the Kindle Fire passes through those servers, whether you’re browsing the Amazon library, hanging out on Facebook, searching via Google, or checking your personal email.

And do you think Amazon’s just going to ignore that wealth of personal information flowing through their network? Absolutely not. They’re going to mine that data for all it’s worth, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Aside from the usual profile creation to better tailor ads and services, there’s no way of knowing if and when your personal information will be sold to other companies. There’s also serious questions about how securely that information will be stored; it would be quite a prize for hackers. That’s not a risk worth taking by any means.

I’ve read conflicting reports on whether Web traffic on the Nook Tablet goes through B&N’s servers, but I think that we can safely assume that it does. I don’t believe B&N would pass up such a golden opportunity to collect profitable information on its users.

Your personal browsing habits on the Internet are no one’s business but your own. The ignorant, shoulder-shrugging attitude that so many people have towards corporations’ invasions of their privacy is absolutely appalling, and it’s only going to come back and bite them in the ass. Until there’s an option to disable the use of the corporate servers in order to browse the Web, count me out on this latest round of tablets.

EDIT 12/26/2011: Hoo boy, have I got some heavy revisions and apologies to make. I received a Kindle Fire as a surprise Christmas gift, and I soon discovered that just about everything I’d claimed in this post was wrong.

Yes, the Silk browser does use Amazon’s servers to improve web browsing. However, Amazon claims that none of the data passing through their servers is tied with the user’s identity, nor is it shared with other businesses. More importantly, though, if “accelerate page loading” is turned off within the Kindle Fire’s settings menu, then no web traffic goes through Amazon’s servers at all. Furthermore, any data sent securely via HTTPS (which many banking sites and web-based email systems used) ignores Amazon’s servers completely, even if accelerated web browsing is enabled.

So yeah, I was a complete fucking moron when I originally wrote this post. Fortunately, the gift-giver never read my original post, otherwise I really would’ve felt like an asshole. Please accept my apologies for screwing up, and I’ll try not to make such glaring mistakes in the future.