Superhal, if you don’t want to play, don’t play – but coming into a thread to call the people in it idiots is threadshitting, and it’s jerkish.
twickster. MPSIMS moderator
I once rented a house from Richard Leakey’s brother.
My uncle was head scriptwriter & wrote the pilot for the 1960’s Batman TV show.
Not sure what degree of separation that gets me from anyone, but…
Tracing back from my grad student in psychology days - 5 degrees of separation (through colleagues/mentoring relationships) from Sigmund Freud! The line includes Alfred Adler and Abraham Maslow; they’re not shabby either.
I went to high school and was a Boy Scout in the same troop as two of football coach Frank Kush’s nephews. Kush coached at Arizona State for 22 years and coached the Baltimore Colts from 1982 to 1984.
I met Kevin Bacon when they filmed Footloose at my high school.
And I was in a couple of background crowd scenes; I guess I can say I was in a film with KB!
I have two connections to a heck of a lot of Hollywood: my first cousin once removed has worked as an Art Director for some major hollywood movies, starring folks such as Will Smith, Schwarzenegger, J Lo, Brad Pitt, etc. (She is listed in IMDB.)
Also, my kids babysitter’s uncle is an actor who among other things has played the head doctor in the insane asylum that Dr House was in last season.
I share an office with somebody who has shared the stage with Steve Jobs at WWDC.
Your babysitter’s uncle is Andre Braugher? Awesome actor.
Yup, that’s the one. (She’s not related to him by blood - Andre is her dad’s sister’s husband. I actually didn’t know his name until right this moment.)
Ok, I’ll play. Using only connections that know eachother, so no “once was in the same room as”. I have 3 steps to President Obama.
Me-> my dad-> Fredrik Reinfeldt the PM of Sweden-> Obama.
Going by the same route I could connect to all heads of government in the EU I suppose.
If I’m going with having met a couple of times I could do it in two steps. But I have not really interacted with Fredrik Reinfeldt since he was heading the youth organisation of the party and I’m sure he doesn’t remember me.
Funny, I was doing the same thing.
Me-> Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education (I work in his Department) -> David Cameron, UK PM -> Obama.
Actually I can do it in two.
Me-> David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary (I used to work as one of his team) -> Obama.
Whenever someone tries to get me to join the latest social network I tend to point out that we are all 6 degrees of separation from every axe murderer in the country, so why would I want to play?
I do think it’s interesting that the number 6 is way too high an estimate of the number of links it takes to connect 2 people (at least 2 people in the same country). If I remember what we were taught in Psych 101 some 35 years ago, the experiment that gave an average number of 6 was inherently one-sided. (I think they took random people throughout the country, gave them a bit of info about someone somewhere in the country, and asked them to write to the person who would most likely be able to connect them, and then asked that person to do the same, and so on.)
The kicker is that lots of people obviously took a longer route than the shortest one possible. But nobody took a shorter route than the shortest one possible. I’m sure there’s some mathematical term for this kind of distribution. Anyway, IIRC, the average length of the paths people found was 6, so the average length of the shortest path was undoubtedly shorter.
Just like everyone was surprised, when they made the website that does the Kevin Bacon number for anyone, to discover how low the numbers really are (and that site uses the strict credited-in-a-speaking-role rule.)
Oh, and to answer the OP: I’ve never been in a speaking role so I’m not in IMDB, so I don’t have any connections using the strict rule. But my brother had one line in an 80’s movie, and my father had one line in a 50’s movie, and they each have Kevin Bacon numbers of 3. It’s rare for anyone in Hollywood to NOT have a number of 3 or less. Even Paul Erdos has a Kevin Bacon number of 3.
One thing I like about that site (I’m new here, so I don’t know the rules about posting web addresses, so I won’t; it’s easy enough to Google) is that it’s not particularly Bacon-centric; you can get the number for any two people. So, for example, we found that my father and my brother were also connect by 3 steps.
But if I must find a connection to Nelson Mandela, well, I once knew South African libertarians Frances Kendall and Leon Louw moderately well. They were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 3 times, in 1988, 1989, and 1991; I can’t find the exact years Nelson Mandela was nominated (several times before he won, I believe), but they probably shared one or more years. Do all the nominees meet each other? I don’t know, but it’s the best I can do.
me>my friend Dale> Elvis Presley
me> my husband >Al Gore (speaker at his HS graduation, shook hands w/graduates)> pretty much the rest of the world
Well technically they’re connected by one step, by virtue of being related.
Polycarp I too am a StarTrek fan and thanks to your post I also can trace myself to DrForest Kelly.
I had performed karaoke at a bar in South Beach where Kelly & Justin were when they were filming their movie. Kelly & Justin were on AI and that makes them one step from Randy Jackson and then the rest as you said. This just made me 
Technically, I guess it depends on the meaning of “technically”. Using the strict rule, they’re connected by 3 steps, and I’m not connected to them at all. Which come to think of it, would explain a lot…
I think Jarrow is talking about movie acting connections, not “real world” connections, and that the website he is referring to is the Oracle of Bacon: http://oracleofbacon.org
My cousin was, for a time, the personal assistant to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russel.
A girl I was aquainted with at nursing school had been friends in high school with the younger sister of Jared Padalecki.
My seventh-grade best friend’s sister knew a girl who dated Dave Matthews.