According to a survey by Sheila’s Wheels insurance company, 20% of female Wii users have caused an average of £6.55 damage to themselves or their property, adding up to a total of £20.1 million. The most common injury is pulling a muscle during energetic Wii-ing and some have even ended up in hospital.

Apart from showing that men can manage their enthusiasm more economically, when they get to the hospital with their injured partners the blokes can oggle some of the new cool IT kit  the NHS has got in recent years. Gone are dusty cathode ray tubes, in are gleaming LCD screens and increasingly, small rechargeable hand-held devices. Where once an electrocardiogram required a separate room full of StarTrek gadgets, now a nurse grabs a self-powered box, it’s octopus of leads taking up more room than the printer and ECG machine combined. What next, Bluetooth or would that be Orthodontics only?

NHS finances
It is also suspicious that when one goes to an hospital appointment made for a specific time, you seem to be kept waiting ages for your ‘turn’. Then, after 5 minutes or so with the doctor, going back to the car park shows you have exceeded the nearest hour and so move onto the next charging level. Could it be that the Health Service are deliberately holding you back? They enhance their finances through the extra car park charges generated by delay. You arrive back at your vehicle just a few minutes past the hour, so maximising both their parking fees and the efficiency of the car park.

This is a little like paid-for software updates that give minimal extra features but enough to make you reluctantly buy into them. Unless they are Adobe Photoshop ones. Eighteen years ago we had software capable of rotating a 2 bit line-art image by an arbitrary amount, something Adobe still haven’t achieved in their premier image editor. Scanning in line-art is always a chore because it’s almost impossible to get the scan exactly square. Older software such as Linocolor Elite was able to align the image before scanning but that was in the days of System 9 and not continued into Mac OS X, a great loss.

Artefacts, Whistles and Bells
Making a cut-out is still a case of drawing a clipping path and pulling bezier curves around the object – hair being the worst – or painting a quick mask and converting it to a path. Adobe gave us a few extra tools that are supposed to help but in reality, they are little better than the magic wand. They would do well by concentrating more on making the simple things easier to achieve rather than all the whistles and bells recent upgrades have introduced.

The standard of today’s digital images are usually worse than those taken by a cheap disposable film camera. Lens aberrations can be so bad the edge of an object is hidden in multi-coloured anti-aliasing made worse by jpeg compression artefacts. Lately we’ve been doing books such as the History of Guitars and currently the History of Snipers, both full of cut outs. By the time we reached Zemaitis guitars we longed for a bass because they only have 4 tuning nuts to draw around. And as for the twin necks played by Led Zep’s Jimmy Page and Eagle’s Don Felder… For at least for a month or so afterwards we become total nerds and can spot the difference between a Rez-o-Matik and a Humbucker, a dumdum and a spitzer.

And which art is more lively and less a template, (at the risk of making ‘him’ turn in his grave for such ugly paraphrasing.)