I've always worn my wedding band when I'm working out. A few years ago I realized how dangerous wearing a metal band could be and switched to silicone.

I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

It was a free-for-all with music when I was growing up. My mother was a huge music fanatic so I was listening to everything from country to heavy metal to Indigo Girls to Elton John. I guess when I was really young I didn't like Willie Nelson, and she obviously loved him. Now I do too, I'm so thankful to her for playing his music nonstop.

In grade one and two, I was definitely into heavy metal and Satanic rock music, bands that had attributes that were quote-unquote 'Satanic,' even things like the Rolling Stones with 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' and 'Sympathy for the Devil,' but also like Motley Crue and Kiss and Alice Cooper.

Now, space has its own unique smell. So whenever a vehicle docks, or if guys are out doing a spacewalk, the smell of space when you open up the hatch is very distinct. It's kind of like a burning-metal smell, if you can imagine what that would smell like.

Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

I don't really have a favorite genre. I could listen to a rock song, a metal song, jazz, pop music, whatever. For me, whatever style it is, it always depends on the chord progression, the lyrics, and the melody used.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

I associate heavy metal with fantasy because of the tremendous power that the music delivers.

Historically, Vietnam movies have been profitable. All of them. 'Platoon,' 'Full Metal Jacket,' 'Apocalypse Now,' 'The Deer Hunter.' You're looking at movies that have been not pretty successful, but very successful. The foreign numbers have been extraordinary.

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged in by male energy.

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.

Without Metallica, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing. I have every Metallica record, of course, and I would spend hours on drums in my parents' basement with the stereo behind me, cranking those records and learning Lars' drum beats, beat by beat.

I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit.

I feel that music is such an inspirational form of energy, as baseball is. And especially with Metallica, believe it or not, our shows are very physical. Sports is a very physical thing, too.

When I first got involved in the underground metal scene in '82, '83, there were only about five or six major Death or Black Metal bands around. There were so many other bands that were inspirational, that really helped.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Of course, as consumers, we want cheap and good products; however, if these production processes are exceeding wastewater discharge standards and even causing heavy metal pollution, they will cause long-lasting damage to the ecological environment and public health.

My biggest failure is 'Metal Gear.' It's my biggest failure and my biggest success.

On April 16, 2010, 34 Chinese environmental organizations, including Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Green Beagle, questioned heavy metal pollution in a letter sent to CEO Steve Jobs.

A person whose skin is metallic can no more have its reproduction restricted than a black-skinned person. Regarding life as a form of machinery and intelligent machines as people without our environmental limitations is essential in understanding FAP, the Final Anthropic Principle, which deals with evolution in the far future.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.