Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind:
Charles Bronson (cut in front of me in a hot dog line at my junior high school), Lance Pitlick (ran into him during a tour of Ottawa – and he signed the 1997-1998 Senators Team Picture), Cam Ward (my cousin sold his house while I worked at his office), Ruth Klüger (at an invitational dinner), Moving Units, Rooney and The Format (I've done logistics for their concerts at UCSD), Michael Craig Hillmann (faculty/grad school mixers at UT), William Powers, Jr. (spoke with him briefly at graduate student event at UT), William S. Livingston (had a fifteen minute conversation with him at the same event), David Buss (turns out that he's the father of one of my long-time friends), Kevin Martin (got to shake his hand and congratulate his gold medal win after we shared a flight to Edmonton), David Dorward (met him at a charity golf tournament), Brooklyn Lee (do you really want to know?), Penn & Teller (Vegas of course!), Nimrod Shapira Bar-Or (sat in front of my wife on a flight), James Rolfe (at the screening of his movie), Deborah Hertz (history department events), Steve Ballmer (at a wedding), John Leguizamo (front row seats at one of his shows), Zeina Mina (presented at the same conference as me), Bob Miller (pitcher, born 1926) (turns out he's the father of a family friend), Ahmed Goneim and Sherif El-Erian (during the course of my doctoral research), William Shatner (ComicCon!); "Weird Al" Yankovic (during his 2022 tour), Jonathan Frakes, Jeffrey Combs, Doug Jones, Nicole de Boer, Marina Sirtis, Andrew Robinson, Armin Shimerman, Todd Stashwick, Connor Trinneer, Jess Bush, Tawny Newsome, Ethan Phillips, LeVar Burton, Robert Picardo, Ed Speleers, Gates McFadden, Wil Wheaton, Sonequa Martin-Green, Walter Koenig, Denise Crosby, Chase Masterson (on the Star Trek cruise, where I saw many others!), Charles Martinet (at Long Beach Collect-A-Con), Wes Chandler (at an autograph signing event).
I'm not related to anyone famous, but apparently Doug Main is my mother's mother's sister's son's wife's mother's sister's daughter's husband's father, which makes us absolutely nothing, in case you were wondering.
An always-changing list, but here's the current status.
A tie between Life's Been Good from the Joe Walsh album But Seriously Folks and P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) from the Michael Jackson album Thriller. Depends on my mood.
While I'm pretending that people care. I'm a retro gamer, what can I say?
