Just for fun


The Power of Play

  • Bernie DeKoven at his playful best

    Bernie DeKoven at his playful best


    Deepfun.com – This is a wonderful blog highlighting the unique world view of Bernie DeKoven, who for over 40 years has been a troubadour singing the virtues of play. This specific blog piece talks about Pop Up Playgrounds, a new and interesting concept of building creative play spaces that are easy to make and pack up. Bernie’s site, Deepfun.com is a repository of games, references, descriptions of events and observations on the the joyfully profound, yet under recognized power of play.
  • Bronx Stickball 30+ years ago

    Bronx Stickball 30+ years ago


    Streetplay.com – A site where people from New York and other Northeastern urban environments who are old enough to remember can be reminded about what it was like growing up and playing in an unstructured and unsupervised environments.


Mind Games

Riddles, Brain Teasers, Puzzles – fun to anyone interested in these mental exercises:

  • Riddlenow.com – A riddle site with a manageable amount of ads. Here’s their top 10
  • Palindromes – A nod to a former supervisor who’d rattle off these meaningless but interesting statements as a relief from daily boredom at the job
  • Tongue Twisters – A little alliteration and a lot of laughs
  • Hidden Pictures – Back in the day, the only thing that made seeing the dentist bearable were the hidden pictures in the stacks of Highlights magazines


Am I the right Michael Greene?

Looking for another Michael Greene? It’s a pretty common name. In fact according to mongabay, a site specializing in names Greene ranks # 228 in terms of the most common surnames in the United States.

According to U.S. government, Greene had 119,604 occurrences in the 2000 Census. This means that out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, Greene would occur an average of 44.34 times.

The male/female ratio is pretty close (males 49.3%) so let’s say there are 22 males with the last name of Greene out of every 100,000 people. Given the US population of 308,000,000 people there are about 68,000 males with the last name Greene. Now let’s bring in first names.

The following table lists the top 5 US male names.

Name % Frequency Approx Number Rank
JAMES 3.318 4,840,833 1
JOHN 3.271 4,772,262 2
ROBERT 3.143 4,585,515 3
MICHAEL 2.629 3,835,609 4
WILLIAM 2.451 3,575,914 5

In other words, for every hundred males, about 2.5 – or 25 males per thousand are named Michael. Therefore of the 68,000 males with the last name of Greene, about 1,700 of them are named Michael Greene. Hey, you might be looking for the jeweler from Sacramento who got the site Michaelgreene.com, or the former Grammy award president (once the highest paid non-profit exec). I can understand if I’m not the guy you were looking for! No problem.

Now it really can get complicated if we include names that sound like Greene. For example if we take the surname Green without the e……..

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