Been dealing with cabbies since the night we arrived. Caught one in the middle of Najda Street an hour after touching down.

Cabs become a part of your life here, unless you take on the risky/expensive proposition of driving yourself.

What you ought to do is make an arrangement with a cabbie you like and pay him extra to come pick you up at a certain time and place. Because otherwise you find yourself standing on the edges of hot and dirty sidewalks, trying to wave down someone on 110-degree days.

Yes. Talked about that here before.

The news here, and I don’t mean to bury the lead, is that the city’s cab companies seem to have been turned over to thousands of guys who just parachuted into Abu Dhabi.  And these guys are … drivers from hell.

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Let’s play a little detective/sleuthing game.

Examine this list of names:

Doria Aura, Mitzi Laquanda, Damien Louis, Deon Cantrell, Janna Loise, Ami Despina, Nobuko Stephen, Towanda Bronwyn, Farah Drema.

OK, what do they have in common? Or to put it another way, what do those names say to you?

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My daughter Britt sent me an interesting photo. Shot by National Geographic.

It is No. 4 in this group of photos.

What strikes me as interesting about this is …

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Thank goodness. Dodgers fans aren’t all passive sheep as I feared they might be. Showing up at Chavez Ravine and cheering on the boys in blue without thinking in the slightest about the bigger issues behind the scenes.

A former colleagues, Dennis Pope, has done a question-and-answer piece with a guy named Ben Covette, “creator of the Facebook page and Twitter stream ‘Blue Lasorda Rising’” who was planning to lead a demonstration today, publicly expressing the group’s unhappiness with the McCourt regime, outside the courthouse in Los Angeles where Frank’s and Jamie’s appalling divorce case is being contested.

At stake is nothing less than the future of the Dodgers franchise, which fans ought to have picked up on long ago.

Seems as if they finally are. At least some of them.

I have been calling for a boycott of the Dodgers until the McCourts are gone, but fans reacted negatively to that, back in April.

The basics of my case have always been:

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This was easily the craziest sports story I’ve seen in a while.

When I first saw the link to this story, I assumed some racing machine had gotten out of control and flown into the stands and killed this 13-year-old kid.

No, it was far more insane than that.

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I have been given the job of organizing coverage of the local professional soccer league, which is known at The National as the Pro League.

I am impressed by how many UAE nationals play in the league of 12 teams, considering the Emirati population is only around 1 million, which means perhaps 500,000 males and a fraction of those in the 19-to-30 range that is prime for soccer, and a smaller-yet group of them serious athletes.

Each of the 12 franchises can play only three foreign-passport holders at a time, so that means at least 15 Emiratis suit up for every game — or 180 every weekend. That’s a big number for such a small population base.

And perhaps explains why those three foreigners per team account for so many goals.

How many?

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Wow. That looked miserable. Actually, it looked scary.

Professional soccer,  and all that running and sprinting and just maximum exertion … in temperatures described by weather.com as “93, feels like 113.”

That was what we had going on here in Abu Dhabi tonight when Al Jazira played Al Nasr on Day 2 of the local soccer season, just down the street from The National.

I’m fairly amazed that the players performed as well as they did, given the extreme conditions.

How bad was it?

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The Dodgers reportedly have put Manny Ramirez on waivers, and the Chicago White Sox are thought to be interested, so the end of Mannywood could be near. Very near.

If so, he goes out with a whimper more than a bang. Or actually, with a “no comment” … which is fine, because Manny stopped being particularly relevant to the Dodgers at about the same time he tested positive for a female hormone associated with performance-enhancing drugs, in May of 2009.

I hate to say “I told you so” … OK, I actually love to say it, because it’s not often I get to say it … but I predicted this Manny thing wouldn’t work out.

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So, the news … the NFL has fined Chad Ochocinco $25,000 for tweeting on a game day during the time when social-networking is banned by the league.

He is not the first professional athlete to get dunned for posting on his Twitter account. And I can understand why it’s generally not a good idea.

But I believe the NFL and NBA and MLB, at the least, should allow tweeting under certain circumstances.

To wit:

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This is my one and only entrepreneurial idea of the year.

Disney ought to construct a theme park here in the United Arab Emirates. No. Really.

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