From the 3 Kings to Jesus in the 12 steps of Wiki.

1. King
2. Holy Roman Emperor
3. Golden Bull
4. Gold
5. Magi
6. Samaria
7. Palestine
8. Dead Sea
9. Hebrew (language)
10. Israelites
11. David
12. Jesus

(This was harder than I thought, because, of course you can get from "King" to "Jesus" in a LOT fewer steps than 12, so I made them detour for gold in the middle.)

And no one I know

I like running down the birthdays on Wikipedia during my lunch hour. Today was a good one.

• 1863 – Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (d. 1914) -if only he hadn't died in 1914
• 1870 – Saki, Burmese-English author and playwright (d. 1916) -I like how Wiki has him listed as Saki and not H.H. Munro
• 1878 – Joseph Stalin, Georgian-Russian marshal and politician, 4th Premier of the Soviet Union (d. 1953) -Georgian-Russian, like Georgia is all proud of its native son
• 1879 – Paul Klee, Swiss-German painter (d. 1940) -His works are the gateway drug to modernism
• 1886 – Ty Cobb, American baseball player and manager (d. 1961) -Even people who know nothing about baseball recognize this name
• 1912 – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American pilot and general (d. 2002) -First black general.
• 1916 – Betty Grable, American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 1973) -I always get her confused with Betty Rubble
• 1917 – Ossie Davis, American actor and activist (d. 2005) -Always did the right thing
• 1935 – Jacques Pépin, French-American chef and author -His stage shows with Julia Child are hilarious
• 1943 – Keith Richards, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (The Rolling Stones, The Dirty Mac, and The New Barbarians) -How is he still alive?
• 1946 – Steve Biko, South African activist, founded the Black Consciousness Movement (d. 1977) -Martyred in the fight against Apartheid
• 1946 – Steven Spielberg, American director, producer, and screenwriter, co-founded DreamWorks -Keeping Harrison Ford working
• 1963 – Brad Pitt, American actor and producer -adopter of foreign children
• 1964 – Stone Cold Steve Austin, American wrestler, actor, and producer -"wrestler"
• 1980 – Christina Aguilera, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress -Actress? Really?
• 1987 – Miki Ando, Japanese figure skater -quadruple jump

Learn something along the way

In the interest of furthering our interest in Crimea. We are doing a Wikimaze.
Crimea to Cry Me A River.

1. Crimea
2. Russia
3. Sochi
4. 2014 Winter Olympics
5. 2010 Winter Olympics
6. 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony
7. Bryan Adams
8. Michael Bublé 
9. Cry Me a River

Not bad. Under 10.

So this is a thing

My regular followers know that I like to do a Wikimaze every once in a while. The starting and ending points seemingly miles apart, but must only be reached by clicking hyperlinks within the Wikipedia page. This is a ridiculously nerdish (nerdlike? nerdful?) thing to do. But I am a nerd. Apparently, I am not the only one. Yay, Gregory Brothers! (And a h/t to John Green for tweeting it to my awareness.) This is WikiWars.

Way more fun to watch than last night's Super Bowl.

Wikimaze

In honor of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, we are doing a Wiki-maze: Africa to Barack Obama in 13 steps (one of which is the 13th Amendment).

1. Africa
2. Liberia
3. Emancipation
4. Emancipation Proclomation
5. Slave-holding States
6. 13th Amendment
7. United States Constitution
8. freedom of speech
9. Criminal speech
10. Shouting fire in a crowded theater
11. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
12. Harvard Law School
13. Barack Obama

Follow along. Each item on the list can be linked from the Wikipedia article of the previous item.

Wiki-amazing

My friend posted on Facebook yesterday, a status that read, "Wikipedia make stupid people into dangerously stupid people." In flagrant disregard of this warning, today's post is a Wikimaze. The rules are simple. Pick a starting point and an ending point. Get to your ending point by only clicking live links within each Wikipedia article beginning with your starting point. In light of all this talk of Greece and it's possible downfall in the news, as well as speculation on the survival of OWN in the cable TV world, my starting point is Opa! and my ending point is Oprah.
Here we go:

1. Opa Opa 
2. Eurodance 
3. Scat singing  
4. Mississippi Mud  
5. Alvin and the Chipmunks  
6. Anthropomorphism  
7. Empathy  
8. Narcissistic personality disorder  
9. Megalomania 
10. Control freak
11. Napoleon 
12. Italian Rivera 
13. Apennine Mountains 
14. European Union 
15. G8 
16. NATO Summit 
17. Chicago 
18. Oprah Winfrey

Never thought a Greek ouzo toast would lead you through Alvin and the Chipmunks, megalomania, the Italian Rivera, and drop you, 17 clicks later, at Oprah Winfrey, but there it is.

Happy Wikiversary

For blogging subjects, when it rains, it pours. This weekend we had the first round of NFL playoffs, the Golden Globes, Miss America, and today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
But we're skipping all that and instead, we'll celebrate 10 years of Wikipedia by doing a wiki-maze from 2001 to 2011 in ten steps:

1. 2001
2. popular culture
3. mainstream
4. romance novel
5. Georgette Heyer
6. Royal School of Mines
7. Albertopolis
8. London
9. London Plan
10. 2011

Yay for Wikipedia!

Oh the places you'll go

It's been a while since I've done a train of thought wiki-maze. Yesterday was Hugh Jackman's birthday. He played Wolverine in the X-Men movies, so, in honor of that we'll do Wolverine to wolverine:

• Wolverine (comic book character)
• Hugh Jackman (actor, sexy guy, just turned 42)
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (book about mid-19th century China)
• Taiping Rebellion (deadliest civil war in history)
• Charles George Gordon (British general)
• Ronnie Kray (infamous English gangster)
• U.S. Department of the Treasury (they have their fingers in everything)
• Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury)
• Ford Motor Company (auto manufacturer)
• Michigan (U.S. State)
• Wolverine (vicious mammal related to weasels)

Yes, there is a link to each on the previous wiki entry. Otherwise, it's cheating. One of the coolest things about wiki-mazing is the completely off-the-wall stuff you can bump into.

p.s. Send positive vibes to Chile for the next day or so.

wiki A to Z

A to Z in wikipedia.
Rule: start at any A and follow links with each succeeding letter of the alphabet. This is one I did.
Atlas: "Abraham Ortelius is credited with issuing the first modern atlas on May 20, 1570."
Bologna (the city)
Charlemagne (the king)
Dürer (the painter)
Erasmus (theologian)
Free will
Go (the game)
Hiba (wood)
Ishikawa
Japan (the country)
Korea (also a country)
Latin alphabet (an alphabet within my alphabet!)
Middle Ages
Northumbria
Oswald
Pagan (or "list of Pagans")
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (I cheated a tiny bit on this one.)
Rome
Sistine Chapel
Trompe l'oeil
Union Square (in New York)
Vaux, Calvert (landscape architect)
Washington, D.C.
XM Satellite Radio
Yamaha (or "Yamaha Motor Co.")
Zakspeed (I cheated a tiny bit on this one too.)

Wiki maze

Following links in Wikipedia:

1. England
2. London
3. Whitechapel
4. Charles Dickens
5. Phiz
6. George Cruikshank
7. James Gillray
8. William Hogarth
9. Gin Lane
10. Charles Lamb
11. William Godwin
12. Mary Wollstonecraft
13. Gilbert Imlay
14. Daniel Boone
15. Kentucky
16. Bourbon whiskey
17. Maize
18. Bamboo
19. Bamboo shoot
20. Nepal
21. People's Republic of China
22. China
23. Terra Cotta Warriors
24. Chicago Fire 1871
25. DeKoven St.
26. Loop
27. Midtown Manhattan
28. The Brook
29. John F. Kennedy
30. Vaughn Meader
31. Bluegrass
32. African-Americans
33. Minority
34. Islam
35. Imamah
36. Occultation
37. Regulus
38. Leo
39. Ovid
40. Metamorphoses
41. Pyramus & Thisbe
42. Mulberry
43. Fruit
44. Juniper
45. Juniper berry
46. Gin
47. Plymouth gin
48. Plymouth, England
49. Plymouth, Massachusetts
50. The First Thanksgiving Feast

...which is one of the most complicated ways to get from Pilgrims to Thanksgiving. BUT, as you can see from this wikimaze, gin (not to mention bourbon) is inexorably linked to Thanksgiving. So drink up.

And Happy Thanksgiving!