Six Degrees of Separation between Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Payne
Six Degrees of Separation
by Israfel Want to
see how close you can get to Bruce Payne? I’m game if you are!! Well,
what are
we waiting for? Let’s join in the game and get started!! SIX
DEGREES OF SEPARATION OR SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACON I first
played this trivia game under another name on AGWLBP in 2003. When
Ariel and I collaborated with AGWLBP on the Bruce as Bond campaign, we
also had a now defunct Bruce as Bond forum where the webmaster of
AGWLBP placed
the game as one of the forum topics. I had a blast playing the game, so
for
this reason I’d like to put my thinking cap on and start playing the
game
again! So that there will not be any confusion or misunderstandings, we
will
refer to the game here on Bruce’s Angels as Six Degrees of Separation. The
concept is based on the small-world studies done by Dr. Stanley
Milgram, one of
the most innovative and outstanding social psychologists of the 20th
century. In the original study, Milgram sent 60 letters to random
people in Wichita KS asking them to forward a letter addressed to
a person in Cambridge MA to someone they knew who might know someone
who might know someone... The idea was to get the letter to the target
person in Cambridge only using people known to each link in the chain
as they went along. Thus the last person in the chain had to
actually know the person in Cambridge. Through this and
subsequent
studies, the average number of links or people it took to get from any
random person in the US to a target person was SIX.
In truth it didn't always work but when it did, six was the average
number of people. Thus the name "small
world." Are you skeptical? Well,
Ariel was only one degree away from Milgram (OK, that's cheating
because he was her dissertation chairman at City University of New York
Graduate Center. We are not kidding.) But she tells me that she
was once only two degrees of separation from President Reagan and is
currently two degrees of separation from the just past Prime Minister
of Mongolia, Tsakhiagiyn Elbefdorj. Ariel gets around. On a less
lofty note, she is three degrees of separation from Bruce Campbell and
two degrees of separation from Clint Eastwood. Not that it has done her
any good, she adds. :) Well, she did meet Bruce Campbell
but that's a story for another time... In our
version of the game, we are using Bruce Payne to be linked instead of
Kevin
Bacon. The
concept is simple, but finding the smallest number of links can be
difficult. The way you link an actor with Bruce is like so: 1. Pick any
film actor in history 2. You
must connect the actor to Bruce in six steps or less 3. Link
Bruce via movies he's shared with other actors until you end up with
Bruce
Payne himself. It may
seem a little intimidating, but it's really a lot of fun once you get
rolling
with it and it really tests your trivia/movie knowledge! Here's an
example (see graphic above) using both Bruce and Kevin Bacon: 1. Samuel L.
Jackson was in Star Wars 3: Revenge
of the Sith with... 2. Christopher
Lee who was in Sleepy Hollow
with... 3. Johnny
Depp who was in Edward Scissorshands
with... 4. Dianne
Wiest who was in Footloose
with... 5. Kevin
Bacon who was in Pyrates
with... 6. BRUCE!
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