I am still on the Los Angeles Galaxy’s media list, so I get this stuff sent to me, and this item came a week ago, and I have intended to mention it ever since. It’s about a 16-year-old forward the Galaxy has signed. And this most certainly is premature, but could this Jack McBean kid […]

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I was prepared to dislike Steve Horn. I was a serious college newspaper editor, by gosh, and he was president of Long Beach State University, and that is the natural order of things. Student newspaper/school president: mongoose/cobra. I arranged an interview with him in the fall of 1975, when I was editor of The Forty-Niner, […]

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It was fairly big news: A veteran of the Premier League would be joining the Al Ain club here in the UAE Pro League. I’m not sure we have any of those in the country, at the moment — Premier League veterans. Guys from some other big leagues, like Seria A (Fabio Cannavaro) and La […]

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Every serious soccer nation has several layers of competition, and most have annual competitions that involve all of them in one big messy group. Such is the case in the UAE. It’s called the President’s Cup, and it involves all 30 or so real soccer clubs. Which actually are quite a lot considering about 90 […]

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We can’t expect the UAE to celebrate some of the more obscure and mysterious Western holidays. Especially ones originally based on Christianity. Like, say, Valentine’s Day. It’s a rather weird concept, if you try to explain it to someone unfamiliar with it. Someone from, say, the Arab world. “OK, there was these early Christians who […]

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First thing I think of when I look at the hed I just wrote is to be sure I spelled “license” correctly. The British, and I work at a British-language newspaper, spell license one of two ways. To “have a document which allows you to do this, that or the other” actually is a “licence” […]

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A handful of people made enormous impacts on American exercise habits in my lifetime. Jim Fixx was one of them, and he dropped dead after a jog at the age of 52. Yes, he had a family history of heart problems, and had been an overweight smoker into his 30s, but still … as I […]

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Seems a long time back, already, but it was just two weeks ago in Doha that my colleague at The National, Chuck Culpepper, and I were talking about revolutions, and we agreed that the “default setting” for most people who grew up in democracies is to side with the revolutionaries against autocrats. Even if we […]

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I don’t know how big this story is back in the U.S.  Talked about, I imagine, out there … but not exactly something that has the country agog. Something along the lines of “all politics are local.” However things are, back in the States … in this part of the world, the Egypt story is […]

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I have experienced ongoing plumbing problems since arriving here. Talking bathrooms and kitchens and drains here. Just wanted to make that clear, considering my advanced age. The latest? The bathroom sink that keeps oozing.

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