There have been two problems, both involving veterans. After receiving the big money, Mark Blount has been about 60 percent of the Mark Blount of a year ago. And then there was the resident star, who has played much of the season in a pout…

— Bob Ryan, “Ainge may not be able to wiggle out of this,” Boston Globe, Feb. 25, 2005

The resident star is apparently so famous that he does not need to be named. His absence of namingness signals his fame, so to speak. It’s takes one-namers such as Madonna and Cher one step further, all the way to being a non-namer. Now that’s fame!

I, of course, don’t have any idea who the article is referring to. Presumably, a computer trying to parse this article, even just to index it, is going to have less of an idea.

Here’s where you get to jump in and explain that latent semantic indexing would associate cues such as “star” with other articles where the star is named, and thus computers are smarter than I am and I ought to take my hair-sprouting protoplasm back to the swamp that spawned it and not only that but chrome takes a polish better than my sagging flesh ever did. To which I reply that if computers are so smart, how come they haven’t sent an Arnold-like cyborg from the future and have it assume the reins of government. Yeah, how come? Answer me that, bit-brain-boy!

Categories: Uncategorized dw