Tag Archive for 'news'

Absurdity is the only word that even begins to describes this crap: Latino critics are claiming that Star Wars Episode 2 has major racial stereotyping. They claim that the clone army, modeled on bounty hunter Jango Fett (who apparently appears to be Latino), toys with American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its cloned army of swarthy lookalikes who march in lockstep by the tens of thousands. That is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard! For one thing, the actor that plays Jango Fett is from New Zealand! It’s quite amusing though when you realize that the planet that they are made on is called Kamino… They also claim that his kid, the soon to be Boba Fett, appears to be even more Latino. The great part is that some Arab association claims that Boba Fett appears to be Arab, and that him calling his father Baba (which apparently means “Father” in Arab) is stereotyping Arabs as some kind of evil clone army. So, what we have is two different ethnicities that both want to claim racial stereotypes on the same character, does it get any better than this? And I can just hear the complaints if the movie didn’t include some racial diversity: “Our whiny, never satisfied minority is underrepresented in your stupid movie!” No matter what you do you can’t win with some people. Obviously this is a build off of the whole Jar Jar Binks Rastafarian stereotype. While we’re at it, I can come up with a few of my own: You know those Trade-Federation guys, they sure seem to have some Asian-Oriental undertones; and Darth Vader, he stereotypes people with asthma as being bad; and Anakin being played by Hayden Christiensen, he characterizes whites as whiny, bratty teenagers; and the term “Dark Side,” it associates the color black with evil things. Barf.

Bad News
This is very sad.

This is SO freakin’ awesome. You like robots right? You like soccer right? Well, check this out! A UCI guy was awarded a National Medal of Science, too bad UCSD wasn’t on the list!

Of course everyone knows that Intel has released their new Pentium 4 at 2.53 3gHz (or at least I THINK everyone knows). The thing that is good about this though, is the price drop that they are doing on older processors. Intel processors have always been really expensive (thus I have an AMD processor), but they have been very dependable. To see them dropping prices, and even offer a Celeron for less than $90 is going to be very beneficial to the market. Even though you don’t care, things are going to be very interesting in the processor industry as we approach the end of the year. The article is informative, but dumb because AMD is still at the top of my list. “AMD for Life!”

Okay, this is the coolest thing in the news. The Hubble Space Telescope is back up and running again after getting fitted with new lenses and stuff, and the new pics are even more amazing than anyone expected. They are so colorful! I was going to put a couple of other items in here, but I think that I want to keep this thing brief. You can look at this story if you want though. It is the annual “State of the Air” rankings, and, just as you’d expect, almost all the smog offenders are in California. The little map is the best because there is this nice little string of red dots through the middle of CA.