Just as an aside, here's the link to the Oracle of Bacon server, where you can type in an actor's name and get his or her "Bacon number."

I was at the scrapbook convention today and had hoped to say hi to Ali. Unfortunately, I was busy working in a booth and by the time I got my stuff and headed out, the line was long I needed to get out the door.

I wanted to congratulate her for the great fundraising job she's doing and for the design work she did for her husband's campaign. I've always liked her scrapbooking stuff.

I reaaallllyyy love scrapbooking, so I'm giving up a lot to head down to Salem tomorrow for the SCC meeting. Not only am I giving up the opportunity to work more hours in a booth, but also the money (or products) I earn for doing so. ; )

My cousin's kid is autistic, and one of the most kind-hearted children I've ever known.

Payday's next Friday.

I know what I'm doing with some of it. For Kyle.

Autism is a hugely burdensome condition that looks like it may often be emotionally painful to its sufferers and certainly is to many families. Its prevalence has risen dramatically in the past three decades (order of magnitude ca. 2 of 10,000 to ca. 67 per 10,000, or 1 in 150) for reasons that no one understands, though frustration has led many to grasp at theories with little evidence, or to hang on to others with much evidence against them, such as blaming a form of mercury formerly used as a vaccine preservative. The care burdens fall on families but also on the public, particularly in need to provide special education. I support this effort, though I also think it points to a need to put much more basic medical and epidemiological research back under public funding.

The party game comes from the idea of "six degrees of separation," proposed by someone whose name I forget, and now also the premise of a t.v. series. The theory is that each of us is connected to every other person in the world by a social chain no more than six steps long.

For example, I am three degrees from President Bush -- a friend was involved in a bitter tenure dispute at Stanford with Condi Rice, then an anti-affirmative action provost there, despite having benefited from AA herself. So, 1, my friend, 2, Condi, 3 GWB.

I'm only two from Nelson Mandela, who another friend met in a Johannesburg airport international flight waiting pen before he was elected president, or also through directly knowing a man who I met as an exile scholar in grad school who was on Robben Island with Mandela for a period and now is on South Africa's highest court, and actually other similar connections related to my former scholarly work. Of course, the first would be useless for trying to contact Mandela; the second would be a remote possibility.

The shortness of these paths indicates something about central people -- my path to a random peasant woman in rural Swaziland would be considerably longer, though probably shorter than most bloggers here.

I am not sure if being on the same blog with people counts :-)

"Kevin Bacon" rhymes & has the same syllable structure and emphasis as "separation." His name was picked out for the game partly for this reason. It also worked because at the time (the game was around by the mid- or late- 1980s) he was kind of middling star, famous for "Footloose" & getting interesting parts e.g. in "Diner," but not really a big star with a huge number of films under his belt.