Grinding it Out

This is the autobiography of Ray Kroc. He did not invent McDonalds. But he took it from a single store in CA to the global conglomerate it is today. Ray started out selling paper cups. While doing that, he had a side job of playing the piano. Not sure how he got any sleep.

Later Ray was amazed at something called a multimixer. It made milk shakes. He started a company selling them. He had to pay off his prior paper company to get the rights to it. Then he visited the McDonalds brothers' hamburger store. He talked them into expanding nationally.

Ray's first wife refused to go into business with him at his multimixer startup. He fell in love with another woman, but she was married. So he married someone else as his second wife. Eventually he talked this other woman to divorce her husband. He divorced his second wife to marry his third wife. WTF?

PaRappa the Rapper

This book details PaRappa the Rapper, a 1990s PlayStation 1 video game. The game is sort of like Guitar Hero. But you need to press PlayStation controller buttons to match the beat of the music playing. You start in Master Onion's dogo. There are 4 or 5 other situations where you must match the beat.

The game was developed in Japan. It was released well before any similar genre like Dance Dance Revolution. The book does not go into how the characters in the game appear like they are made of paper and are super thin.

Apparently there was at least one sequel with a similar name. There was also another follow up game with the same character, but had a different name.