Weather is boring when it’s not happening to you. Where you are. Right now. But I have complained often enough about our seven-month summer here in the UAE that I feel as if I owe it to nature to mention that it was just amazingly fine on Friday. It would have been hard to order […]

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The Asian Games are going on right this minute, in Guangzhou, China. They stage these every four years. Think of the Pan-Am Games and you’ve got the idea. A hemispheric gathering in which organizers are allowed to introduce sports with regional — but not global — appeal. Thus, we have men’s and women’s cricket on […]

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Time for a list. I’m not doing enough of them. One thing I learned in journalism but never put into practice often enough: People love lists. They do. Even bad lists. So, you judge the merit, but here comes a list … Of the American TV shows we currently look forward to most avidly. Counting […]

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That’s what I’m calling it. A slump. Just a string of unfortunate results. Accidents, even. I don’t actually look like that. A little down period on the mugshot front. It began the other day. 2005, I think it was.

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For non-Muslims in the UAE, Eid al Adha is the most notable for this: It is the longest holiday on the calendar. At The National, this was a one-day work week. Sunday. Eid al Adha then began on Monday, hit a zenith today and continues on for two more days, at least in the governmental […]

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Abu Dhabi has a reputation as a place of law and order. Aside from the life on the streets. Not like “on the streets” in the “homeless” sense … but life on the streets. As in “driving.” When people here are behind the wheel of a motor vehicle … this is not the Mideast, it […]

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I’ve seen enough Formula One racing to know that leaders don’t get passed often. Or at all. Not unless their cars break. And some tracks are even less likely to produce a pass than others. Especially after the first few turns of the race. If you are fast enough to qualify up front, it’s just […]

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David Beckham has had rather a rough go of it in Los Angeles. He has been hurt, he has gone off to play chunks of years in Europe, he has been rather knocked around in the book “The Beckham Experiment” (the Landon Donovan comments). And then he suffered a ruptured Achilles’ tendon that took him […]

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I liked Kevin Love from the moment I saw him. A big lumpy kid who couldn’t be as good as everyone said he was … but was. As I mentioned just a few days ago, I saw a lot of the Bruins during that stretch of three-straight Final Fours … and Kevin Love played for […]

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Even 15 years ago, keeping track of a U.S. sports team from the other side of the world would have been a dicey proposition. The first sport-specific bloggers were just firing up. (This was even before Bill Simmons.) Not every newspaper paid close attention to its website. (I worked at a place where the managing […]

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