Family Ties meets Sauve Scholarship

In life there are very few degrees of separation between people (or Kevin Bacon). The key is being aware of the relationships between people in some qualitative or quantitative way. Humans can only keep track of so many of this connections and relationships before they losing their meaning. In the book "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" (which can bee seen at the top of this page ... I have recommended it), Malcolm Gladwell explains how 150 people seems to be the maximum number of people who can maintain a community where everyone can keep track not only of everyone else, but also all the relationships between everyone. This was fascinating to me when I first read the book and I bring it up now only as an interesting segue to my real topic. You see one of my recent posts was a tribute to Alex Keaton, a character from a TV show I used to watch called Family Ties. Another post was one about the Jeanne Sauve Scholarship of which I am a finalist. Tonight I found out that there is a link between the two entries (besides both being on my blog). I found out that there are actually pretty close "Family Ties" between Jeanne Sauve and I. She was my grandfather's (the only one I ever knew) 2nd cousin. Making Jeanne Sauve my second cousin twice removed! Sounds far off? Perhaps it is: it basically means that her great grandparents were my great, great, great grandparents. However I just found out that she and my grandpa were very close as kids. Is that not ridiculous? Plus everyone in my family seemed to know about this but me! And I'm the one trying to apply for this scholarship! There is usually an element of disclosure involved. So here I am... disclosing. I am not supposed to contact them directly so instead I hereby make it public knowledge that I am related to Jeanne Sauve but was not aware of it at the time of my application and therefore included no indication of it in the application. Now I can sleep in good conscience.
As a conclusion, the universe (or Multiverse for all you quantum physicists out there) is a complex place full of unseen links and relationships. Be aware of them and you can experience things on different levels.

Tribute to Alex P. Keaton

This is an extension to my “Tribute to beautiful” which was arguably influenced by my great admiration of Television’s Alex P. Keaton; a lovable, ambitious, egocentric, profit seeking character from the hit series Family Ties. Michael J. Fox’s portrayal of Alex was the personification of young corporate America in its rawest form during the 1980s (decade of greed) and was a positive inspiration to myself and all other profit minded kids of those days of Yore.

My “Tribute to beautiful” was inspired by a radio jingle that Alex wrote for himself. The tune, whose lyrics were simply “Alex Keaton, he’s so cute”, can be seen in an episode called Blues Brother from season 6 of Family Ties. The jingle cracked me up so bad that I remember it to this day, along with every other mundane detail of my life from 1985 on.

I’d also like to thank Wheelrchair for this episode reference.

Not being able to locate that actual clip, I will leave you with this tribute video: