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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...