The Plight of the Rich

For those who didn't already know, I'm delivering pizzas in Wilson for the summer before going off to Delaware for grad school. Wilson is a lakeside town with a lot of money, but today I had to deliver to a house that completely redefined what "rich" means to me.

As I pull down their long, perfect driveway, I see a black Jaguar sitting in the driveway turnaround. "Nice," I think, and walk up to the door. A girl in her late 20s comes to the door with a phone and couple bills in her hand. "$27 even," I tell her.

"Do you have change?"

"Yeah, how much do you need?" Keep in mind, it's about five o'clock, so this must be one of my first deliveries. She hands me a crisp $100 bill.

"Uh, I don't have that much change."

"Uh-oh. Hold on a second," and she starts dialing on the phone.

Just then another car starts pulling down the driveway. I don't know a lot about cars, but I know it's a luxury car just by the aura it exudes. "Oh, here he is," the girl says, as if I had known who she was calling.

The car pulls up and parks in the garage, which I was later told also holds a jet-ski and boat. Out gets this grumpy-looking guy in his 40s. He looks annoyed at the girl.

"It's $27," she tells him.

"Why didn't you just give him a 50?" he asks.

The girl looks at me like you do when your parents make a pop culture reference that's wildly out of date, like everybody knows $50 bills went out of style ten years ago. "I don't have $50 bills," she says.

The man pulls out his wallet and pulls out a 20 and a 10 and tells me to keep the change. I beat it out of there and get back to the real world.

The whole incident makes me realize the difficult issues rich people must deal with on a regular basis. Not being able to fit all your expensive sports cars in your garage, people not being able to make change for your huge bills...

P.S. I would never complain that $3 isn't enough of a tip, but I regularly get that much from people in the trailer park a few miles down the road in the other direction, and they don't make me stand there while they flaunt what wealth they have. Just makes you think.

PS3 at E3

I love E3 every year, but most especially during the years when new console systems are coming out. I think the announcements from Sony concerning the PS3 are probably the most exciting E3 news I've heard since I blossomed into full nerdhood circa 1998.

You can watch the entire 2-hour press conference at Gamespot, like I did, or if you're a normal person you can just read the condensed version I'm about to post. I know some of this stuff is old news, but in case you haven't been following along, here's all that was said about the new system, in order:

-It will play PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, along with DVD and Blu-ray movies (if you don't know what Blu-ray is, it's most likely the successor to DVDs. There's a competing format called HD-DVD that's already available, and cheaper to produce, but less impressive).
-Every system will come with a hard drive! There will be a 20GB model as well as a 60GB model to choose from.
-Online components will be incorporated into many aspects of the system, including the obvious online play and downloadable content, as well as "community"-type functions such as messaging and friends lists.
-The new controller is not shaped like a batarang, but fully resembles the familiar PS2 controller. Even though it's wireless, it is lighter. And to top it all off, it senses movement in six ways: XYZ movement, as well as rotation along the XYZ axes (pitch, yaw, and roll, for you aeronauts).
-The system will be released in the US on November 17. The 20GB model will cost $500 and the 60GB version will cost $600.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that XBox came from behind and stole my heart toward the end of the current generation. Its system was more powerful, had generally better games, and the S-type controller turned out to be very intuitive. But it seems like the shoe is on the other foot this time around. The XBox 360 is now the system you need to buy add-ons to make complete. Instead of incorporating a next-gen storage medium, they stuck with plain DVD (and are planning to release an HD-DVD addon sometime in the future). They are expected to announce a motion-sensing controller at E3. And of course, the hard drive is not a standard feature either. Keep in mind that just because it is possible to have a new controller, hard drive and HD-DVD support, developers now have to make games assuming that consumers have none of them (because why alienate part of the market by making games their system won't play?).

The PS3, in addition to being a next-gen gaming system, will be among the cheapest Blu-ray players you can get right out of the gate. I bet a lot of home theater enthusiasts who have no interest in video games will want one for that reason alone. On top of that, game developers will know that every PS3 owner has a hard drive, and can make games with that in mind. That will mean shorter loading times, for one thing, but could also mean faster framerates, greater graphics and texture processing, and who knows what else.

As for Nintendo, I still see their controller as an incredibly interesting prospect. The PS3 controller has motion sensing, but without an external sensor it won't be able to detect the controller's position in relation to the screen the way the Revolution (err, Wii) controller can. Seems like a minor difference, but I can see certain situations where it would come in handy, like drawing football plays on the screen, or using the controller as a pointer. These PS3 announcements seem mostly aimed at Microsoft, and I think the Big M should be pretty afraid right now.

Of course, it all comes down to the games in the end, and most of the games they showed were pretty lackluster. A bunch of fighting games, some war simulation games, and some first person shooters. Metal Gear Solid 4 and that untitled Naughty Dog game are the most exciting of the bunch. If Halo 3 is better than Halo 2, then the 360 might be worth picking up for that and Oblivion (after the price drop, that is). But right now it looks like Sony has the edge. Just show me some games I actually want to play!

Summer reading

(sorry about this annoying empty space, it's the only way I can get text next to a picture... don't ask me why)

"[John] Steinbeck states about East of Eden, 'It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.' He further claimed, 'I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.'" I just finished East of Eden, and dammit, I loved every word of it. It further cements my belief that Steinbeck is the greatest American novelist, and has bumped The Grapes of Wrath as my favorite book by him.

So now that I'm done with that, it's time to make a summer reading list. Here are a couple titles I'm kicking around, but I'd love suggestions from anyone who reads (hey, isn't that what you're doing now???).

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
I've heard nothing but good things about it, mostly from Jess, but also Entertainment Weekly, which named it one of the best novels of 2005. Count me in.

The Truth (With Jokes), by Al Franken
Let's get one thing straight: Franken is the man (assuming people still use that expression). I linked to a nice conservative blog by a psychotic bitch I saw on O'Reilly that time I made the mistake of watching Fox News. It doesn't really say anything about the book, but tries to make Al Franken sound like a raving lunatic. Makes me want to read it even more.

Metamorphoses, by Ovid
I read selected stories from this in Humanities class my sophomore year, and was astonished at how graphically entertaining it is, even by today's standards. If it was a movie it'd be a well-deserved NC-17.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
I've been meaning to read this since the movie came out, and somehow haven't done it yet. The link goes to a "book review" that's really just a bunch of quotes from the book with some plot summary thrown in to tie them together. Some people just don't know how to foist their opinions on people...

That should get me through the summer, allowing room for some recommendations from other people. Or maybe another classic I've been putting off (Crime & Punishment?)