What's Your Bacon Number? Google Plays 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'
Google can give curious minds a lot of helpful hints. It can help answer that trivia question that no one seems to be able to answer. It can help you with spelling, give you the weather, do calculations - almost anything you need.
Now, it can give you your Bacon number.
A Bacon number refers to the trivia game " Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," in which you try to connect different actors to Kevin Bacon via the films they have appeared in. For example, Harrison Ford starred in "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" with Karen Allen. Allen starred in "Animal House" alongside Bacon, therefore giving Ford a Bacon number of two.
To search, just type "Bacon number" and an actor's name into the Google search bar. You will then get a number with the actor's connection to Bacon. (Some non-actors are included as well.)
"What am I…zero!" Bacon tweeted Thursday with a link to directions.
"I guess in my heart of hearts I kinda knew I was a ZERO," he later added.
The game that launched the phenomenon was invented in 1994 by three college buddies, Craig Fass, Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli. An advertisement for Bacon's film "The Air Up There" appeared on television while the three friends shared a bottle of Southern Comfort.
"Somehow this occurred to us: Kevin Bacon had been in so many different types of movies, it was possible to connect a lot of unlikely people together through his work," they wrote in their 1996 book, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon."
And their idea took off.
"There could only be one explanation," they wrote. "Kevin Bacon was at the center of the entertainment universe."
With the help of Google's new feature, it's difficult to find an actor with a Bacon number higher than three. Even Kim Kardashian has a Bacon number of two. The reality star appeared in "Deep in the Valley" alongside Denise Richards, who starred with Bacon in "Wild Thing."