When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.

But what really excited me was the idea that humans had a tremendous pre-history that went back millions of years. I wanted to go to Africa to find some of these creatures.

My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

On the professional side, those 18 years on the farm instilled my love for agriculture.

I think a film should have a gestation period of at least two or three years.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

Congress did a good thing back in 1995 in passing the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act. That act did a simple thing. It provided automatic royalty relief for new leases for 5 years in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means, so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.

So now 20 years later people want us to get together so they can take shots at all these old babes trying to get back some youth. I mean come on; I've been there. I know what the press would do.

So it was out of necessity that Blackheart was born. I think it's great that now, 25 years later, we're not only putting out our own music, but are able to put out music by other bands. That's really exciting for us.

Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year's Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself.

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.