Five Minutes of Internet Fame

Alex was chatting on some board or other (Gaia Online I think - it's an MMORPG) when someone mentioned The First Church of Mad Scientist as one example of an internet cult. He said he had trouble convincing folks that in fact it was founded by his ol' dad.

It is gratifying in a weird way to have made some tiny impression on the history of the world wide web. References can be found:

http://www.memecentral.com/mu/mu0005.htm

http://www.centerofweb.com/scitech/scifun_mad.htm

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070630225329AAOq66L

The home page of FCOMS has long since gone away. All I've got these days is a series of posts on MySpace.

Some Folks Have History

Alex again. For some reason he was wandering around movie/actor pages and made the observation that Jackie Chan has been in 91 movies since 1961. This seemed like a lot, but when you consider being an extra , just a body in the crowd, then the numbers for many actors can shoot up.

Especially back in the golden days of the big studios when new movies were being made weekly.

SO I tried thinking of actors who might have made lots of movies. We worked our way around to Drew Barrymore, who occurred to me mostly because I remember she started young. Not that her number was very high. But it naturally led me to comment on her family's long connection to Hollywood. Which led to tracing back her ancestral actors.

Lionel Barrymore acted in around 214 movies. I think there were 20 in 1912 alone - mostly as an extra, but he was there.

Yes, so Drew Barrymore's family has Hollywood history. In fact, the family's history goes back at least another two or three generations in the theater. Back when the name was not Barrymore but Drew, back in the mid 1800's, they were actors of note. And Alex and I didn't even try to trace back further. Nearly two centuries of acting tradition. Some of the most notable names in the history of film. You've got to wonder how Drew stands up under that weight. No wonder her dad had drug problems.