6 degrees of separation

There is a game I have heard people refer to called “Kevin Bacon”.  The principle of the game is the 6 degrees of separation.  Someone chooses an actor and within 6 steps someone else has to find a way of linking them to Kevin Bacon.  I have never been too knowledgeable on the movies of Kevin Bacon so I adapted the game slightly and often set myself little challenges to link an actor to one of my favourite movies, “Pulp Fiction”. 

It can help pass a few minutes of you are really bored.   I decided one day to try and take this to another level and see if I could actually use the game to link myself to my favourite movie and I was surprised to find that it was fairly easy and I could actually do it in 5 moves due to a chance meeting with a Hollywood actor on a night out in Dublin many years ago.  This is how it works.

Ian B Met Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel Byrne was in The usual Suspects with Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey was in Se7en with Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt was in 12 monkeys with Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis was in Pulp Fiction

Nowadays with everyone on social networking sites the links are getting easier.  I have found some really odd connections just in my small circle of Facebook friends. The weirdest one occurred a few years ago when I received a friend request from a work colleague and found that one of our mutual friends was a girl I met in Australia 15 years before.
Finding that my wife’s brother was a mutual friend of another work colleague was a close second, it turns out that they were best friends while at school.