The Bacon Number

I assume you are aware, Gentle Reader, of the game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”?  It is a ‘shortest path’ algorithm as to how far an actor or actress is removed from Kevin Bacon.  This is the actor’s / actress’s Bacon Number. 

“Huh?”

It’s not as bad as it sounds, save that you have a love for movies.  Take an actor – for our discussion let’s say, Robert Downey Jr.  Now we have to connect him to Kevin Bacon.  It goes something like this…

Robert Downey Jr. and Clark Gregg appeared in The Avengers.

Clark Gregg and Kevin Bacon appeared in The Air I Breathe.

So, we can extrapolate that Mr. Robert Downey Jr.'s Bacon Number is 2

I would love to tell you that I pulled that out of my hat.  I did not.  While I am a huge fan of the movies, I would have to really take my time and think it through.  “Animal House” is a huge blessing since so many actors were in that with Kevin Bacon and so with that film alone you can make hundreds of connections.  Still, it is, at times, no easy feat. 

Enter Google!

Google has now added to their search engine the Bacon Number.  All you have to do is type in the actor’s / actress’s name and the words Bacon Number and voila!  And now you to, with the help of Google, can whip out the Bacon Numbers with aplomb and succinctness! 

What did we do before the internet? 

Mr. Bacon has built a charity around the game and it from his SixDegrees.org website that I took the picture for this humble blog.  You can find it here: http://www.sixdegrees.org/kevinbacongameforgood.

No, really; what did we do before the internet?