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Homeland Security Follies: Bruce Schneier Interviewed

Oct 21

10 Zen Monkeys, April 2007

According to the sleeve of his latest book, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security, “in an Uncertain World, Bruce Schneier is the go-to security expert for business leaders and policy makers.” If only the policy makers would listen, we’d be safer, happier and still free.

Other books include Applied Cryptography, described by Wired as “the book the NSA wanted never to be published.”

Beyond Fear deals with security issues ranging from personal safety to national security and terrorism. Schneier is also a frequent contributor toWired magazine, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and many other fine periodicals. He also writes a monthly newsletter, Cryptogram.

I interviewed him on The R.U. Sirius Show.

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The Chicks Who Tried to Shoot Gerald Ford

Oct 21

10 Zen Monkeys, January 2007

“Want a really radical look, grrls? Duct tape a revolver to your inner thigh and carve a goddamn X in your forehead.”—Richard Metzger, 21.c, 1998 

On the morning of September 5, 1975, President Gerald Ford walked out of his room at the Senator Hotel in Sacramento California to speak to the California legislature about crime. A 26-year old woman in a sort-of all red nun’s outfit stepped in front of Ford and pointed a 45-colt automatic pistol.

She was immediately grabbed and restrained by the Secret Service and Ford was hustled off to safety. Weirdly, although the gun was loaded with four rounds, there were no bullets in the firing chamber. Since Fromme was a leading member of the notorious acid cult the Manson Family one could conjecture that although she failed to correctly load the gun, she may have gotten herself properly loaded. According to eyewitness accounts, upon being captured, she said, “Don’t get excited. It didn’t go off. It didn’t go off. Can you believe it?”

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Counterculture & the Tech Revolution: an Interview with Fred Turner

Oct 21

10 Zen Monkeys, November 2006

Back in the day, when people were still asking me to explain “Mondo 2000,” I used to tell them that we were doing this psychedelic counterculture magazine called “High Frontiers” in the mid-1980s and we were shocked — just shocked — when we were befriended by the Silicon Valley elite. Suddenly, we found ourselves at parties where some of the major software and hardware designers of those early days were hanging out with NASA scientists, quantum physicists, hippies and lefty radicals, artists, libertarians, and your general motley assortment of smart types.

I was being a bit disingenuous when I made these comments. “High Frontiers” already had a tech/science bias, largely because we’d been influenced by the “Leary-Wilson paradigm.” So we were technologically progressive tripsters. I’d also followed Stewart Brand’s work with interest through the years.

The connection between the creators of the driving engine of the contemporary global economy, and the countercultural attitudes that were popular among young people during the 1960s and 70s was sort of a given within the cultural milieu we (“High Frontiers/Mondo 2000”) found ourselves immersed in as the 1980s spilled into the 90s. Everybody was “experienced.” Everybody was suspicious of state and corporate authority — even those who owned corporations. People casually recalled hanging out with Leary, or The Grateful Dead, or Ken Kesey, or Abbie Hoffman. You get the picture.

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Neil Gaiman Has Lost His Clothes

Oct 20

Neil Gaiman didn’t arrive naked when he graced our MondoGlobo studio on Sunday, October 1. But according to a post on his website, he had lost most of his clothes. “What are the odds that, if I was sent a box of clean clothes to wear, a box that was waiting for me in New York, I would somehow manage to pack most of the clothes that were inside back up in the box along with the awards and books and CDs I’d been given, not to mention the already-worn UK-trip clothes, and then send that box with my clean clothes in it home, and that I would only discover the awful reason why my suitcase was so light on a Sunday morning in San Francisco?”

Rest assured, Mr. Gaiman didn’t smell like several days sweat, and he looked pretty much like you’d expect a comic writer and fantastical novelist to look: all in black, including the leather jacket. And if he felt like he was in the middle of one of the most common types of nightmares, he didn’t seem disoriented.

In fact, he didn’t even tell us about his travails and he pretty much carried the interview (along with my co-host, Diana Brown), while your humble host (that’s me) was in something of a somnambulant fog brought on by that day’s health issues (I’ll spare you.)

And then there was the presence of Paul McEnery, who had interviewed Gaiman for MONDO 2000 back in the mid-1990s. “We broke him in America,” he assured me. I had ignored his pleas to participate in the program, not wanting to crowd the show with too many cooks, but there he was, and so he was invited to kibbutz.

All in all, it worked. This is a damned fine Neil Gaiman interview.

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