The Six Degrees of Fred Dalton Thompson (300th Entry)

Wow! This marks my 300th entry for this blog. I suppose given the fact that two people looked at this yesterday, one has to feel that I am either a) very dedicated or b) insane.

Last week, I saw the latest Kevin Bacon film "Death Sentence," which the "Footloose" star almost carried on his own. The Death Wish-vigilante plot is though really over-the-top, but that's another matter.

This gave me the idea to see how many degrees of separation there are from Kevin Bacon, and those presidential candidates who have been in movies.

Amazingly enough, there are four candidates who has screen credits, and three of them are Republicans!

Everyone knows that Fred Dalton Thompson, the former GOP senator from Tenn., has been in numerous films like "The Hunt for Red October" and was in tv's "Law and Order." But, fewer people may know that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Sen. John McCain (R-Az) and former New York mayor Rudolph Guilani (R) also have several film appearances to their credit.

Thus, I decided to see how far removed they were from Kevin Bacon. As many of you know, a University of Virginia computer science student came up with the Oracle of Bacon, which can let a person know how many film credits separate Bacon from another actor. The system even has the likes of Turkish film icon Cuneyt Arkin (see earlier entry), who is three degrees removed from Bacon. If an actor appeared in the same film as Bacon as local actor R. Keith Harris did in the 1998 film "Digging to China," then there is only one degree of separation.

So, here are the degrees of separation from Bacon and the four presidential candidates:

1. Fred Dalton Thompson (2)

Thompson was in "White Sands" (1992) with John Lafayette.

Lafayette was in "Loverboy" (2005) with Bacon.

2. John McCain (2)

McCain was in "Wedding Crashers" (2005) with Lauren Fritz.

Fritz was in the Bacon film "He Said, She Said" (1991).

3. Rudolph Guiliani (2)

Guiliani was "Anger Management" (2003) with the gorgeous Marisa Tormei

Tormei was in "Loverboy" (2005) with Bacon.

4. Hillary Rodham Clinton (3)

Clinton was in "Final Days" (2000) with Kevin Spacey.

Spacey was in "The Shipping News" (2001) with Debroah Glover.

Glover was in "The Big Picture" (1989) with Bacon.

Other political figures I found, include another New York mayor Ed Koch (D). He was two degrees removed from Bacon as is  Ronald Reagan. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who has some feature film credits, was also two degrees away from Bacon.

If you want to see how many degrees your favorite star is from Kevin Bacon, the link for the Oracle is simply:

http://www.oracleofbacon.org