Who is Kevin Bacon ?

One of my professors is fond of academic genealogy. He talks about his academic father (his PhD adviser) , his academic grandfather (who by simple logic would be his PhD adviser's PhD adviser), and all other possible relations, brothers, uncles, nephews etc. Two things intrigued me immediately. First, the absence of any aunts or sisters or mothers. Talk about a patriarchal society. And second, the tremendous geek pride palpable in every syllable. Of course, if I were to say that Einstein is my academic father, ok, grandfather or great grandfather come to that, I would stow away that nugget of information and take it to my deathbed. But in no case would I publicize this 'fact'. There are some things that a man can just not be proud of. But I thank God that such responsibility has not befallen me.

So after this class I set off on my own little hunt, trying to learn more about this curious hobby among the 'doctor kind'. I was surprised to learn about another form of this genealogy in the so called Erdős number. Paul Erdős was the quintessential and perhaps the only itinerant researcher. Extremley brilliant and eccentric to an equal degree. Erdős number of an author is a way of describing the collaborative distance between an author an Erdős. The following is an excerpt from wikipedia about the same.

"Erdős wrote around 1500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-written. He had 509 direct collaborators[1]; these are the people with Erdős number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdős himself) have an Erdős number of 2 (6,984 people), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdős number of 2 (but not with Erdős or anyone with an Erdős number of 1) have an Erdős number of 3, and so forth..."

I understand the concept, but in the process I also came across several variants of the Erdős number, the most hilarious of which was the Erdős-Bacon number. When I came across this page I was laughing to the point of stomach cramps. The reason being that the individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Now who the fuck chose Kevin Bacon !!! As far as I know the guy was a star. Not a big star. Starred in a number of B grade movies and personally irritates me because he doesn't have any lips. If you don't believe me, look up some of his movies. As even a small bit of common sense would suggest, there would be very few number of people who would have a finite Erdős Bacon number. I get the impression that this is the mind work of a really bored set of indviduals. Anyway, who gives a damn.