<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">There's a new post on the <a href="http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">Web of Language:</a><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;color:windowtext;
mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Guilt by association: My Sarah Palin number is 2.
Does that mean I palled around with terrorists?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-weight: normal; ">My Sarah Palin number is 2. That means I can never be president, which doesn't bother me, but it seriously reduces my street cred, since the vice presidential candidate stands for everything I've been satirizing for years.</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">My connection to Palin is tenuous but damning: my former editor <a href="http://www.usu.edu/usupress/about/" mce_href="http://www.usu.edu/usupress/about/">Michael Spooner</a> knew her back when he lived in Alaska. Nevertheless, as <a href="https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0810&L=WPA-L&T=0&F=&S=&P=30511" mce_href="https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0810&L=WPA-L&T=0&F=&S=&P=30511">my Palin connection</a> put it in a recent listserv post, "Nobody's clean. Nobody."</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">A Palin number is like an Erdös number. Mathematicians make a game of seeing who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös. It's a six-degrees-of-separation thing. The number of steps you need to get from your article to one with Erdös as co-author is your Erdös number.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">An Erdös number <em>requires</em> co-authorship. If it just entailed knowing someone who knew someone who knew Erdös, then I could claim an Erdös number of 4.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana"><span>A Bacon number is like an Erdös number – it's the number of steps needed to connect an actor to the actor Kevin Bacon (oddly enough, Bacon wasn't in <em>Six Degrees of Separation</em>). My Bacon number, like my Erdös number, is 4: my daughter has an IMDB credit for working on a movie with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=pat+morita&x=0&y=0" mce_href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=pat+morita&x=0&y=0">Pat Morita</a>, who was in a movie with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001315/" mce_href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001315/">Marcia Gay Harden</a>, who was in </span><em><span>Rails and Ties</span></em><span> with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000102/" mce_href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000102/">Kevin Bacon</a>. To have a Bacon number, you have to have a movie connection, which I do. I shot many home videos of my daughter's birthday parties.</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana"><span>It was a bummer to find out that my Palin number was 2. But to make matters worse, my Bill Ayers number is 2 as well. </span>Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground in 1969, was a domestic terrorist who made bombs, went underground, reformed, went back to school, and now teaches educational theory at the University of Illinois in Chicago.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">Barack Obama has a Bill Ayers number of 1, because he met Ayers on a number of occasions since they both lived in Hyde Park and served together on some community organization boards.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">Unlike Barack Obama, I never met Bill Ayers (I'm at the University of Illinois in <em>Urbana,</em> not Chicago), but I do know several faculty members at UIC who attended faculty meetings where Ayers was present. Because of his Ayers number, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/ap-palins-ayers-attack-ra_n_132008.html" mce_href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/ap-palins-ayers-attack-ra_n_132008.html">Sarah</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/ap-palins-ayers-attack-ra_n_132008.html" mce_href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/ap-palins-ayers-attack-ra_n_132008.html">Palin accused Obama</a> of "palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." Since I've got a low Ayers number, Palin would probably call me a domestic terrorist as well. . . .</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana">To find out if I'm really a domestic terrorist pallaround, read the rest of the post on the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><a href="http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">Web of Language</a></span></font></p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">Dennis Baron</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">Professor of English and Linguistics</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">Department of English<span class="Apple-converted-tab"> </span><span class="Apple-converted-tab"> </span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">University of Illinois<span class="Apple-converted-tab"> </span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">608 S. Wright St.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">Urbana, IL 61801 </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">office: 217-244-0568</font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">fax: 217-333-4321</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></font></div></span><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000EE" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(72, 72, 72); font-size: 11px; "><a target="_new" href="http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron" title="My faculty home page" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 128); text-decoration: none; ">http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron</a></span></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></font></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">read the Web of Language:</font></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#144FAE" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(72, 72, 72); font-size: 11px; "><a target="_new" href="http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage" title="The Web of Language blog" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 128); text-decoration: none; ">http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage</a></span></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#484848" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; text-decoration: underline; "><br></span></font></div></span></div><div><br></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>