Friday, April 13, 2007

Would You Rather and Famousr

There was a little game that I've played amongst my friends for many years, and I am sure that more than a few of you have played a variation of it. That game is "Would you rather?" in which participants are given a choice between two alternatives (both either really bad or really good) and they much make a decision as to which is preferable. Neither is a copout answer, and as such, that person is generally scorned by the rest of the group, and speed is a virtue in this game.

Of course, me and my friends played it a little differently. We played "Who would you rather?", throwing out two celebrity names and seeing who more would prefer to sleep with. Now, I played the game with members of both genders, so it wasn't the chauvinistic thing it seems at first, and if you haven't tried it with a friend, it is great fun(and great blackmail material as well).

But the true fun of the game was derived from repeatedly asking someone to make the decision about a single person until they are eliminated or chosen. For instance, if you asked someone to choose between James Woods and Edward James Olmos, and they chose James Woods, you would continue to ask them to compare other actors to James Woods until he was no longer chosen, or compare Edward James Olmos until he was chosen. After a while, you start to see trends and limits of both ends of the desirability scale, but as you play, well, you always find a surprise at one of those ends.

The reason I bring this up, is I was reminded of this game when I was playing around with a feature of the relatively new site Famousr.

You see, there is a database of 8000 actors, and as people play the game of determining which actor in a random pairing is more famous, statistics are being compiled... and an interested party can put in two names and see who is more famous based on those statistics.

Now finding someone who is more famous than someone else is sort of easy, much like it is easier to find that one person to top them all in "Who would you rather?". But finding that person at the bottom of the heap, the most shudder-inducing person is where the diamonds are found.

Therefore, my challenge is to find the least famous listed person on the site(and since it has only been up for about 4-5 days, there are a lot of people who are not yet listed, so my memory for names and faces is making this harder than it may have otherwise been). So far I am at Stephanie Hodge from Unhappily Ever After, but I know that there are less famous people on the site(though not being able to find someone may be an indication that they are not famous enough).

Anyone else want to play?

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