Like Buckaroo Banzai, Deren Hansen is often going in several directions at once. He took, for example, a degree in anthropology—from M.I.T.
Prior to that he survived the bombings during La Guerra del Fútbol between El Salvador and Honduras, earned a Double Ruby in the NFL, and lost his pants while walking down Main Street.
Deren has been a Hagley Fellow, the Co-Dictator of the Physics Club, and the Ambassador to Harvard for Extra-terrestrial Civilizations*. He has worked on nuclear weapons, created fractal models of fungal growth, and tried to achieve world domination by changing the fundamental data model for commercial computing.
Fortunately, for all concerned, he discovered that writing is a socially-acceptable outlet for his congenital megalomania.
Deren lives with his wife and son in Provo, Utah—which he takes as evidence that, at a fundamental level, the universe is governed by irony.
* See Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT, MIT Press, 2003, p. 140
