Showing posts with label Bacon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bacon. Show all posts

July 8 - Happy Birthday, Kevin Bacon

Posted on July 8, 2018

Today's famous birthday was born on this date in 1958, and he is an actor with lots of movie and TV credits.

Kevin Bacon is super well known for a reason that doesn't have much of anything to do with him - specifically, for the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game.

Okay, so maybe you don't know the game, and you're wondering how "super well known" he could really be for this game. And I have to admit, I'm kind of old. So maybe Bacon is super-well known among some age groups because of that game - but younger generations are all, "Kevin Who?" "Six degrees...? What?"

There is an idea that all people are six or fewer steps away from one another. If you could know EVERYTHING about two different people, for example, you would be able to find acquaintances of acquaintances that would connect them in a chain of no more than five individuals.




It seems unlikely to me that you could link up United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa, who lives in South Africa, with Jacob Slaetalid, a kid who is growing up on the cold and remote Faroe Islands, with just five acquaintances! 


But network theory tells us that the world is "shrinking," metaphorically speaking, because of the increasing interconnectedness of people through the internet and social media. If Slaetalid or his parents have ever met just one highly connected person - maybe a globe trotting educator visited Jacob's school, or one of his parents consulted a visiting medical specialist - then there probably could be a 5-or-fewer-links chain of acquaintanceship linking the two, improbable as it seems to me.

Now, what about that Kevin Bacon game?

The game goes like this: Someone names an actor that anybody could look up on the movie database IMDb (the database also includes information on TV programs and video games as well as movies) and the other players have to try to figure out a work-connection chain that is no longer than six steps between that actor and Kevin Bacon. 



Why Kevin Bacon? He's pretty prolific, which means that he's been in a lot of movies and TV shows and other projects. For example, IMDb lists 77 movies that Bacon has been in, along with 110 TV series, 51 TV specials, 39 videos, 29 TV movies, 13 short films, and a few other projects as well. 

If you look at the entire cast and crew of all of those movies/television productions/projects, that's a pretty massive collection of people you could connect to some random actor, right?

By the way, the largest entry in the "Trivia" section of Kevin Bacon's IMDb article is about the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It claims that everyone in Hollywood has a "Bacon number" that tells us how many steps one has to take to link that person professionally to Bacon.

The inventors of the game were inspired when Bacon said, in an interview, that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood, or someone who has worked with them. They went onto The Howard Stern Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, explaining their game; they released a book called (of course) Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and there was even a board game based on the concept!

Now, what does Kevin Bacon think about all of this?

According to Wikipedia, at first Bacon didn't like the game, because he thought that people were making fun of him. But later he came to enjoy the game. It looks to me like Bacon eventually really embraced it, because in 2007 he started a charity called SixDegrees.org, which links celebrities and causes. Grass roots organizers and local changemakers can submit events they are hosting onto the SixDegrees website, and somehow the SixDegrees people link that event to a recognized celebrity who is able to either drop in on the event or at least give a very public shout out about the event. Because of this celebrity link, the first three weeks of Six Degrees' existence, they were able to generate more than 87 thousand dollars worth of donations. Celebrities also contact the charity to find causes that link up with their own concerns and interests.

Kevin Bacon has won a lot of acting awards and even more nominations - although no Academy Awards or nominations! - but he has also won several humanitarian awards for his charity! Very cool, Mr. Bacon! And happy birthday!




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July 19 – Anniversary of the Revival of Flitch Day

Posted on July 19, 2016

Flitch Day is a reeeeallllly old custom—a married couple who could swear to not regretting their marriage for a year and a day was, in parts of England, awarded a flitch of bacon. (A flitch is a side of unsliced bacon.)

The tradition goes back centuries—back to the 1300s, if not even earlier. The 14th-Century writer Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned the awarding of a flitch at a town called Dunmow, which is still one of the pockets in England associated with the custom.

But, like so many others, this tradition died out.

A Victorian Era writer named William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a book called The Flitch of Bacon—and the book became way popular and sparked interest in the old tradition! On this date in 1854, the ceremony was revived after more than a century of disuse.

These days, every leap year (but on different dates in that year) there are Flitch Trials in Great Dunmow. The couples who want to claim their flitch of bacon go “on trial,” kinda-sorta, and a counsel cross examines them in an effort to figure out if they really deserve their bacon! The trial is decided by a jury.

Although the flitch of bacon was apparently only rarely awarded to couples in the past, these days it's easier to earn. This year, on July 9, four English couples were awarded flitches of bacon, and one runner-up couple was awarded a gammon (which is a ham that has been cured like bacon).



Somehow these trials remind me of the movie Defending Your Life. 



Also on this date:







Anniversary of a collaboration between giants



































Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:
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June 11 – Roger Bacon Dies (?)

Posted June 11, 2013


We are not very sure of the dates of births and deaths of people who lived a very long time ago. Most societies did not keep records of such things, except for the kings and queens; even if records were kept, many were on paper and have been destroyed; even the records that lasted long enough for modern scholars to copy them may not provide us with certain birth and death dates. After all, people have not used the same calendar all over the world, for all times, right?

So we are not totally sure that Roger Bacon died on this date in 1294. Heck, we're not even totally sure that he died in 1294!

However, this is Bacon's traditional death-date, and I wanted to talk about him. So let's keep the question mark in mind as we explore Doctor Mirabilis, or “Wonderful Teacher.”

Roger Bacon (AKA Doctor Mirabilis) was an English philosopher. He spent his whole life thinking, studying, teaching, and writing. The teaching occurred at Oxford and the University of Paris, in France. After he became a friar in the Franciscan order, he was no longer allowed to publish books or pamphlets without getting them approved. However, Bacon was a friend of sorts with the Pope, and he was invited to write about philosophy and science and theology—a request that allowed him to get around the Franciscan law.

His protector, Pope Clement, died in 1268, and a decade later Bacon may have been put into prison (or perhaps house arrest). Wherever he was, Bacon continued his studies of mathematics, astronomy (astrology), alchemy, optics, and languages. 

So...why are we talking about Roger Bacon?

You may be wondering what alchemy is, or
was. Well, you might say that it was the proto-
science that developed into the sciences of
chemistry and medicine.

By the way, Bacon is usually credited with
being the first European to describe how to
make gunpowder, which was invented by the
Chinese.
Bacon was one of the thinkers during the Middle Ages who urged that beautiful, simple concepts that philosophers dream up should be, as much as possible, tested. In other words, Bacon was one of the early voices supporting empiricism—the idea that experiments and observations can tell us about reality, about the way things really are, why things are the way they are, and about causes-and-effects.

(Thinkers such as Aristotle and the Muslim scientist Alhazen made even earlier contributions to this philosophy and the scientific method. These two were major inspirations for Bacon's work.)

This insistence on checking ideas against the real world is very important. Without it, any cockamamie idea can be proposed and even believed—and, trust me, plenty of cockamamie ideas have been both proposed and believed. Experiments and observation can help us find out what is really true!

Also on this date:













Anniversary of the premiere of the movie E.T.








Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on June holidays, historical anniversaries in June, and June birthdays.

And here are my Pinterest pages on July holidays, historical anniversaries in July, and July birthdays.


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