This is a fascinating book. The first fascination is his way with technology. The second was his way of bypassing the technology by deceit. What he did seemed like magic to people and scared the crap out of them. Scared them to the point targeting him, I felt, out of proportion to his crimes.

The book portrays a kid burdened with some kind of compulsive disorder. I felt genuine concern for him because he was clearly a vulnerable kid in many ways. Am I being manipulated to have sympathy for him? Possibly.

Sometimes it seemed like he wanted to get caught. I kept thinking, “how can the great Kevin Mitnick be so careless?”
He is constantly getting busted because he left evidence lying around. He did his hacking from phone lines that could be linked to him. He left piles of incriminating disks and printouts in his car while he engaged in unauthorized visits to phone company facilities. He showed off to people that he should not have trusted.

How did a guy with such a knack for hacking social systems as well as computer systems fail at hacking our legal system? A good lawyer could have protected him from some of the abuse that seems to have happened to him at the hands of the justice system. This was not fully explored in the book, but if Mitnick’s claims about outlandish accusations and court proceedings are true, then there are questions about the fairness of his early trials.
Finally, he had a knack for enraging his friends and fellow hackers to the point of them wanting to help the authorities bust him.



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This perfectly sums up the logical fallacies of the gun lobby.

This book was helpful in learning more about the U.S. House of Representatives.
It was very instructive to learn about the Speaker’s frustrations in dealing with various white houses. It sounds like Carter’s staff was extremely aloof and hard to work with, while Reagan’s staff was very diligent.

The book is strong on stories and light on analysis. Tip looks back on the highlights of his career but doesn’t get very deep. It certainly paints O’Neill as a saint. There are a lot of insightful observations and funny anecdotes. The conversational tone makes his garrulous Irish uncle voice come through.

In spite of the breezy tone, this book is able to bring across the essences of political characters and events. Tip’s own experiences help colorize well-known historical events and people (Michael Curly, ABSCAM, Watergate, Iran Hostage crisis). There are some passages, though, that are third hand stories presented as fact. For instance, he talks about a meeting between Einstein and Roosevelt about the atom bomb. None of Einstein’s biographers think that such a meeting ever took place.

It was interesting to read about the early days of C-Span in doing so learn that Gingrich has always been a rat:

I happened to be watching in my office one afternoon as Newt Gingrich was taking advantage of special orders to attack Eddie Boland’s voting record and to cast aspersions on his patriotism. The camera focused on Gingrich, and anybody watching at home would have thought that Eddie was sitting there, listening to all of this. Periodically, Gingrich would challenge Boland on some point, and then would step back, as if waiting for Eddie to answer. But Boland had left hours ago, along with everybody else in the place.

The next day, when Robert Walker of Pennsylvania tried something similar, I called Charlie Rose, the member in charge of television in the House, and told him I thought the cameras should pan the entire chamber. Charlie informed the camera crew, and when they showed the empty hall, Walker looked like a fool.

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I was reluctant to read this book because I thought it was going to be a sad story without much action about a young convict that I was supposed to feel sorry for. Why did I think this? I dunno, the cover? Once I began, though, the plot just took right off and I barely gave a shit about the kid. Graphic and fast paced, this book would make a great movie.

Every so often, I hear someone on NPR rave about a “crime fiction” author. Lee Child and Carl Hiaasen come to mind. I go and read the authors and I’m utterly disappointed because the writing sucks even in the best of them and they aren’t very creative. I feel like I can hear the authors brain scraping an empty plastic bucket looking for fantastic plot devices.

This book, though, is the one I was searching for. It is well written (by a St. Paul author!) and delivers the grit and adventure of the crime genre without the baggage of that genre. I enjoyed the feeling of not knowing what would happen next. I enjoyed the author’s clever turns of phrase and I did care about the main character, a female corrections officer.
The prison had this magical realism quality to it. This made me not able to completely trust the world it was set in. For example, I couldn’t trust that the inmates wouldn’t wake up one morning with the ability to fly because so many unlikely privileges were delivered to them.

I heartily recommend it and my copy is already in the hands of one of my co-workers.



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At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process”, a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves. For decades, these confiscated German documents remained largely ignored in a United States where petro-geologists and petro-chemists were convinced that oil was a “fossil fuel” created by ancient decaying biological debris.

Clearly, big U.S. oil companies had no financial interest in explaining to the American people that oil was a natural product made on a continual basis deep within the earth. If there were only so many fossils in geological time, there could only be so much oil. Big oil could then charge more for a finite, rapidly disappearing resource than for a natural, renewable, and probably inexhaustible one.

The Great Oil Conspiracy explains how Stalin at the end of World War II demanded his petro-geologists “dig deeper”; when petro-scientists in the United States had determined that the Soviet Union, like Germany, lacked national oil reserves. Russia today has challenged Saudi Arabia for the lead in oil production and exportation. Once oil is understood as an abundantly available resource, there is no reason hydro-carbon fuels cannot indefinitely propel the development and production of cheap energy reserves the United States needs to maintain its dominant position in the emerging global economy.

Being physically and socially “on” most of the time instead of slouching front of a computer monitor slinging code meant that I really needed breaks to sit quietly and read. The book I had along was The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans. It is a very powerful book that I will post separately about. I mention it because it led to some interesting conversations with fellow adults and also some dark thinking about the private school that we shared our dormitory building with. If you were chaperoning at wolf ridge this month and someone said, “Gregor Strasser over there won’t let our kids use their bathroom”, then I apologize. I also apologize for referring to the spilled food incident as “your little Reichstag fire”.

The ropes course was the most intense experience up there. As a chaperon, I got to man one of the towers and ensure that kids were transferring their safety harnesses correctly and give them encouragement and advice ( and also crawl out to the middle if someone froze out there, which I did not have to do). That meant I went first with the entire class watching me. I almost shit my britches up there while crossing a wire. I was on the edge of panic and the only thing that kept me going was that it wouldn’t be very helpful to the program if they first had to put up a ladder and remove a 220 pound sack of flesh that had adhered itself to the burma bridge. I kept thinking that the equipment was made for children and would break apart if I fell. It didn’t.

A remarkable thing I noticed is that these kids were largely kind to one another, at least on the surface. When I was in school, the pecking order and the ostracism of socially inept kids was more overt, I think. It is possible that these kids are under more stringent social management (bullying is definitely out of fashion these days and the definition of bullying is very open ended) and so the unkindness could be more underground and more subtle.

This trip made me realize that as parents, we continue the same social drama we had as elementary school kids.

I ate a lot of wheat up there. I indulged in pasta, pancakes, pie, sloppy joes. I ate way more wheat than I’ve been eating for more than a year and I experienced interesting side effects. Most noticeably, my joints started aching. I’ve had a years-long stretch free of back pain and this morning my back is achy like I remember it being often before I started riding to work every day. My knees, hips and ankles are also stiff, especially in the morning. My ankles take a good half hour to “warm up” every morning. This little (very enjoyable) foray into the wheat life will provide a great experiment to see if these symptoms go away when I cut it out again right after I finish this here muffin.

learning to relax with a camera around

They really tore it up on stage. After a Chuck Berry cover, which was awesome enough, they broke into an almost speed-metal version of Satisfaction that gave me chills. While the shows were great and featured the group running for their lives from fans, the best part for me was having a fly on the wall view of them as they hung around their hotel room working on new songs and singing some Elvis and Beatles songs and even some Dion. The songwriting parts where previously unreleased because they “gave away some of the magic.” Fortunately, that reasoning has expired and now we get to see the magic. Brian Jones seems very affected and maybe in the early stages of some mental illness.

Before the film, the theater played an obnoxiously loud video of the Stone’s recent release Doom and Gloom. It was great fun to see it with an theatre full of people. It is playing again on Sunday as part of a weekend-long “Stones Fest”.

I liked this book because it has great characters and allows them to build little worlds for themselves. In addition to the main character, Train, there is a hard-boiled L.A. police Sergeant that reminds me of Don Draper. It is a very dark book. Pete Dexter must live in some kind of hell-world if he can imagine people thinking and acting this way well enough to make it come alive like this in a novel. Thank God he can work it out by sharing it with the world. Like Paris Trout, this book is about race and class in America. There is more slapstick violence in this book than in Paris Trout. Some segments made me laugh until I was undone. Dexter really knows how to capture American males, their pecking order in any given group, and their berserk anger.



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I really wanted to get this bike back on the road, so I went to Sunrise Cyclery on Lake street and found a replacement that is a bit heavier but in good condition for $10.00. I replaced the crankset without stripping the threads or breaking my bike tools!
“Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.”

So now I have this fully functional weirdo bike that is relaxing to ride because there is no way anyone would think they were supposed to get somewhere quickly while riding it. It is the kind of bike you would ride wearing a football helmet and listening to talk radio from a transistor radio hanging off the handlebars and maybe a huge blinking construction light wired into the basket in back.

I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The cops are running away, and you’re faced with this savagery of unleashed emotions. I think it was Middlesbrough. And I couldn’t get in the car. It was an Austin Princess, and I’m trying to get in the car and these bitches are ripping me apart. The problem is if they get their hands on you, they don’t know what to do with you. They nearly strangled me with a necklace, one grabbed one side of it, the other grabbed the other and they’re going, “Keith, Keith,” and meanwhile they’re choking me. I get hold of the handle and it comes off in my hand, and the car goes zooming off, and I’m left with this goddamn handle in my hand. I got left in the lurch that day. The driver panicked. The rest of the guys had gotten in the car, and he just wasn’t going to stick around any longer. So I was left in this pack of female hyenas. Next thing, I woke up in this back alley stage door entrance, because the cops had obviously moved everyone on. I’d passed out, I’d suffocated, they were all over me. What are you going to do with me now you’ve got me?

It was interesting and fun to read this biography knowing that it might be told by an “unreliable” narrator who was possibly under the same spell he accuses Mick Jagger of being under, the 40 years of abject flattery and worship, and also under the influence of heroin, cocaine, and drugs I’ve never heard of before. However unreliable he may be, he gave a good history of his years of struggle with heroin addiction and of painful family events. He recounts losses of friends like Gram Parsons and of course the various accidents and run-ins with the law. He also has a very generous nature and spent a lot of the book appreciating the great friendships he has built over the years. I enjoyed the stories of Kieth’s childhood, his early years of poverty, playing music and knotting his guitar strings together when they broke, of the inside jokes he shared with the other Rolling Stones.

We were cynical, sarcastic and rude where necessary. We used to go to the local caff, which we called the “Ernie” because everyone in there was named Ernie, or so it seemed. “Ernie” became everybody else. “What a fucking Ernie, Christ.” Anybody that insisted on doing his job without doing you a favor was a fuckin’ Ernie. Ernie was the working man. Only got one thing on his mind, making another extra shilling.

There may be some revelations for guitar players as he delves into technical descriptions of how he hacked his guitar to replicate the licks of the blues greats that he worshiped. He writes a lot about his devotion to the craft. He worked tirelessly to turn out some of the Rolling Stone’s most famous albums: Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Exile on Main Street, and Goats Head Soup. He does a great job of telling the story of how that sound came to be realized. Pages and pages devoted to the layout of the studios, who was there, where the inspiration came from. I can’t find anything to refute what he claims about his character, his hard work, and his musical innovations, so I’m leaning towards his being a reliable witness. This was only just completed in 2010. I kind of bought the media image of him being an absolute gonner, but he is much still here. It reminded me again of how hard people work to have some success in their lives. I felt grief when I finished it because I enjoyed his company. Just a really warm, amused guy.

Besides wondering if he was an unreliable narrator, I had a suspicion that this book was just another sensational Rolling Stones album in book form, but I couldn’t put it into words until I found this quote in the New Yorker: “Half book, half brand extension”. Exactly. He (and his co-author) knew that part of their job was to deliver a bit more of the Rolling Stones and give you a thrill and a peek into the band’s inner circle. They certainly achieved this.