No, I am Sparticus

and the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby girl.

Since I don't have the kind of pull to call a press conference, this is the only way I know how to make this very important announcement. Hope you don't mind.

You know that the media frenzy surrounding this tragic event has reached critical mass when the very same people - the media - responsible for the feeding frenzy are asking why we are so obsessed with this tragedy. The media is covering the media now that they appear to have run out of developments in order to keep the story alive and on the front page.

The only way for me to make sense out of this bizarre phenomena is through the computer science concept of recursion.

Recursion is exemplified in a function below. Please stay with me.

....................................
function factorial(n)
{
   if (n <= 1)
      return 1;
   else
      return n * factorial(n-1);
}
....................................

What makes the function called "factorial" illustrated above unique and "recursive" is that it calls itself which is something most functions don't do.

Likewise, the media usually cover stories unrelated to the media themselves. The story started out as the death of Nicole Anna Smith who was not a member of the media, but now without another hot off the press revelation in the last five minutes, they have resorted to talking about themselves.

If it does not make sense to you, that is fine. I don't blame you. To understand recursion, you must understand recursion, and therefore, if you don't understand recursion, you won't understand recursion.

Sorry, that was a computer science joke.

I suppose one can etymologically decompose the word recursion to mean to curse again - re(again) + curse, which seems more appropriate at this point.