A little more about LEGO and LEGOLAND, which I talked about yesterday (see LEGOLAND in Dubai).

Currently there are four LEGOLAND parks in the world: LEGOLAND Billund in Denmark, LEGOLAND Windsor in England, LEGOLAND Deutschland in Germany and LEGOLAND California outside of San Diego, in the US.

There are also three indoor LEGOLAND Discovery Centers - one in Berlin, one in New Jersey and one in Schaumburg, Illinois.

The funny thing is that the LEGO Group actually doesn't own the LEGOLAND parks anymore. An investment company called the Blackstone Group bought them in July of 2005. Actually the deal spun the LEGOLAND parks off into a new company, called Merlin Entertainments Group, and LEGO got something like $457 million and a 23% stake in Merlin.

So the LEGO company owns about a quarter of the parks.

To tie it in to Dubai, the investment arm of the Government of Dubai, Dubai International Capital (a subsidiary of Dubai Holding), owns a 20% stake in Merlin Entertainments Group, after selling Madame Tussauds (yes, the wax museum people) to Merlin in March of 2007.

I touched upon this last year (see LEGOLAND Berlin).

And ... and ... the Blackstone Group, who owns the other 50-something percent of Merlin, also owns half of Universal Orlando Resort. They bought out the original developer back in June of 2000 - back when the resort was known as "Universal Studios Escape".

As you know Dubailand is also getting a Universal Studios theme park. Although this one will be wholly owned by Tatweer, another a subsidiary of Dubai Holding, under a licensing agreement.

This is all very interesting to me ... but maybe I'm just turning nerdy with all of the business studies.