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Needless to say, when I first started dwelling on this
fact a few weeks ago, I was more than a little shaken.
Compared to Budweiser, the Human Screen-Saver no longer
seemed the post-modern totem of ubiquity I had once imagined
him to be. I began to wonder if Tesh had suddenly turned
passe, if in keeping my attention so keenly focused on
him I was overlooking the arrival of some new, more
significant multi-tasker. Maybe this really isn't the
Age of Tesh, I fretted. Maybe it's the Age of Shaquille
O'Neal or Greg Kinnear...
And then I received an e-mail from Paul Kedrosky that set things right again.
Kedrosky is a doctoral student at the University of Western Ontario. During
the course of his studies there, he recently discovered
a somewhat astonishing media trend that I have
subsequently christened Kedrosky's Law. In short,
his search of North American newspapers using the
Lexis-Nexis database revealed that since 1985 the
annual number of Tesh citings has been rising at
a dramatic rate. In the words of Mr. Kedrosky:
"Graphing these numbers produces a harrowing
shape: a classic geometric curve--Tesh articles
are now doubling every year." In just over a
decade, the annual number of Tesh citings
has gone from 6 to almost 1000.
Using this current rate of growth to make
projections for future years, Kedrosky demonstrates that by 2001,
there will be enough Tesh articles to fill
a newspaper the size of the New York Times every day of the entire
year. And by 2012, every major newspaper in
North America will follow suit: 365 days a year, 1794 newspapers,
all devoted entirely to Tesh...
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