You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government you have to travel to the city.

For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

I am fascinated by all the new technology that creates places for us to meet in what is called cyberspace. I understand what it must have meant for the rebellions in the 19th century especially in 1830 and 1848 when the mass circulated newspaper became so important for the spreading of information.

Here you have a new technology and if that technology is going to work you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

I'd like people to be educated on the voting machines making sure that our democracy isn't being hijacked by computer technology. There's no reason there can't be a paper trail on those machines.

After this I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

When I was a teacher teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

I never wore a tie voluntarily even though I was forced to wear one for photos when I was young and for official events at school. I used to wrap my tie in a newspaper and whenever the teacher checked I would quickly put it on again. I'm not used to it. Most Bolivians don't wear ties.