Saturday, October 25, 2008

Now might be a good time to go fight some crime.

Oh, this can't be good.  You know that your building is asking for trouble when you have Moe and Shemp Howard as two of the guards (though one can only wonder where Larry and Curly are at this moment and how they will enter into the fray).  Good thing that TRAZE-R is on the case, ready to alert his human counterpart that evil is on the move (even though he never says where the evil is moving to, and with the speed with which some of these cops seem to move, we might want to start hoping that the evil on the move is, in fact, stationary).
It would appear that there's a slight flaw in TRAZE-R's crime fighting abilities.  Sure, it can tell you that evil is afoot, but when you ask where that evil is, it can only give you an intersection.  Diet might want to consider an upgrade that allows our crime fighting robot to name actual locations (like the names of buildings perhaps?) when it tells Tracy that there's evil somewhere.  That way, we won't have to wait the few seconds (or minutes) for Tracy to think, "Now let's see, Hobson and River Road.  Well, I know that it's by the bowling alley, got to remember to go to league play there on Thursday, but what else is around that area?  The diner?  No.  Dry cleaner?  No, that's near Elm.  Wait a minute!  Of course!  Genesis!"  

Those few minutes might not seem like a lot, but consider the poor guard in panel three, who is about to find out what it feels like to be punched by a robot that can feel no pain and probably doesn't know its own strength.  Still, there is one thing that puzzles me about that last panel, and that is that I'm not sure what the guard is hoping to accomplish by yelling out "Yi!"  Now, unless that guard is trying to speak to the robot in Ukrainian or Rusyn, or is in the middle of discussing a river in China or Uruguay with Magnum, I think that another exclamation would have worked just fine (and been a lot less confusing).  Of course, I could be looking at this the wrong way, and the guard is in fact trying to communicate with the robot by saying "Y I" as in, "Why, I don't think it's necessary to resort to fisticuffs when you are obviously superior to me in strength and size.  Why don't I just let you into the vault and that way you'll get what you want, and I'll still have a face."

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