Answers to the Quiz

Well, it's been a few weeks, and the response to my mystery guest quiz was a loud unimpressed thud. Honestly, these weren't that hard!

The first mystery guest was (of course) Billy Campbell, better known to Star Trek fans as the Outrageous Okona himself.

The second mystery guest was Persis Khambatta, and when I said she'd probably be more recognizable with a different haircut, I wasn't lying.

The third is my fellow Brooklynite Edward Irving Wortis, also better known by his pen name of Avi. I have yet to see a modern young reader novelist as talented as his vaguely autobiographical works like "Don't You Know There's A War On?" and "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?"

The third is strip and peplum queen Chelo Alonso.

The fourth is Jack Williamson, and his most famous novel is obviously "The Humanoids." The first work of his I ever read was "Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods," which was startling not just because it was an obvious rip-off of Roger Zelazny's best novel "Lord of Light," but also because it foresaw the scariest possibility of genetic engineering: not that we would create monsters, but that we would create gods.

As for the last guest, the business about Kevin Bacon should have been a dead giveaway. His name is Paul Erdos, the most prolifically published mathematician of the 20th Century, who is the subject of a Kevin Bacon-esque game among mathematicians. In case you're wondering, my Erdos number is 3, as I took a class with someone that was published with Paul Erdos.

Guess the Mystery Guests!

Go ahead, try and guess! I did my best to make these as resistant to Google-Fu as possible.



I was the original choice to play Commander Riker on Star Trek: the Next Generation, but most people know me better for some little movie I did in the early 1990s.






I dated Ted Turner, Sylvester Stallone, and Henry Kissinger. My religion of choice is Zoroastrianism, and I was politically active enough that I got death threats from Sikh extremists, and my death was believed to have been foul play. You'd probably recognize me better with a different hairstyle.







Alan Arkin is my first cousin, but I'm best known as a writer of children's books, a lot of them derived on my experiences growing up in Brooklyn.






Che Guevara personally went to Europe to persuade me to return to Cuba. I was an exotic dancer that did my bit on the same stage as Josephine Baker, and I later did plenty of Sword n' Sandal movies, including one with Steve Reeves.






I'm a writer from science fiction's early days that learned to read and write on a farm, and I coined the terms "genetic engineering" and "terraforming." I died in my late nineties. My most famous work was about perfect robots that sought to improve everything for mankind, at the cost of all human dignity.





I'm the most prolifically published mathematician of the 20th Century to the point where I'm a downright joke among mathematicians. See if you can guess my relationship to Kevin Bacon.