Source of "Thomasson" is

title:VIRTUAL LIGHT
BY WILLIAM GIBSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
ISBN 0-14-015772-7

He'd first seen it by night, three weeks before. He'd
stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and vegetables, their
goods spread out on blankets. He'd stared back into the
cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from
the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of scav-
enged neon. Everything ran together, blurring, melting
in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic
and singularity of the thing, and he'd walked slowly
forward, into that neon maw and all that patchwork
carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland.
Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of
forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, se-
quins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and
peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his
reeling eye, and he'd known that his journey had not
been in vain.
In all the world, surely, there was no more magnifi-
cent a Thomasson.

Yamazaki watched steam rise from his coffee, imagin-
ing a bicycle covered in barnacles, itself a Thomasson of
considerable potency. Skinner had seemed curious about
the term, and the notebook had recorded Yamazaki's
attempt to explain its origin and the mianing of its
current usage.

Thomasson was an American baseball player, very
handsome, very powerful. He went to the Yomiuri
Giants in 1982, for a large sum of money. Then it
was discovered that he could not hit the ball. The
writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated
his name to describe certain useless and inexplicable
monuments, pointless yet curiously art-like features
of the urban landscape. But the term has subse-
quently taken on other shades of meaning. If you
wish, I can access and translate today's definitions in
our Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic
Knowledge of Modern Terms.