Unconscionable

As my grandmother used to say: "It's not the whole world gone mad... just the people in it."

When bidding ended it sold for $3,600.

Not that it's really my business that someone is willing to pay thirty-six hundred dollars for a PlayStation 3. But this really does seem to be materialism at its worst to me. The Xbox 360 has been out for a year but it'll probably still be another year before we get one: by then it'll be a lot more inexpensive, many more games will have been published for it, and at that point most if not all of the bugs will have been ironed out. To buy a high-end game system - or any other sophisticated piece of electronics - at launch is to welcome all the technical glitches that are probably still in the product.

There's more important things in life than waiting in line for a week at the local Best Buy for a game console... that may not even be in stock anymore by the time you get to the counter. And someone doesn't need to have the latest bleeding-edge toys to have fun.

(Now, I probably wouldn't mind a crack at a Nintendo Wii: much lower-priced, and its controller is really one of the most innovative things I've seen come from the video-game industry in quite a while... but I can still hold off on getting one.)