Al Ain Sports and Cultural Club fields a prominent UAE Pro League team that has had a wretched season. Two key South Americans quit the team just before the season, and Al Ain has had trouble replacing them with anyone who has been able to stay healthy. Exacerbating matters, their promising young goalkeeper was nearly […]

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Interesting story in The National this week. About how people living here in the UAE might be prone to suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) just like those living in regions where the sun rarely shines. Here is a link to the story. If you didn’t follow the link, you must be wondering how we […]

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From the first game I saw here in the UAE, I was astonished by how often players here flop and dive. I have seen Mexican soccer. I have been to Azteca. And I thought diving and flopping could not be worse than that practiced in Mexico. Then I came here, and discovered that Mexican floppers […]

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Being a woman in Saudi Arabia is difficult, as this bit of satire on a regional website points out. They are not allowed to drive, for starters. And it gets much more dire.

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A couple of weeks ago my Dell laptop, which had served me so well since the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, up and died. Didn’t just seize up … quit. Expired. We finally were able to do some diagnostics on it, and the diagnosis was, “Your hard drive is dead.” Which in my world, anyway, […]

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Bernie Ecclestone seems almost like a fictional character. No one like him actually exists, right? A guy who essentially took over a whole race series, made millions (billions?) of dollars in the process, runs that race series like an autocrat and at age 80 shows no signs of slowing down or going away. But there […]

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Stumbled across this on the Vanity Fair site. If you are following the Libya mess at all, this pretty much is required viewing. It’s 15 photos of bizarre — are more bizarre — outfits the dictator has worn over the years. Here is the list. And what name comes to mind as you’re looking at […]

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It’s Saturday, and the metrics for this blog (and presumably every website on the planet) show that readership goes down on weekends. What that means is … you guys are surfing the web, and reading me (shhh!), at work. You are so naughty! So as not to tax you on a day off, or when […]

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The FIFA Club World Cup dropped by Abu Dhabi the past two Decembers. Kind of an odd tournament because it has a couple of famous clubs and then five not all that well known. And not all that many matches, either. So in some ways, the UAE having its bid accepted for the FIFA 2013 […]

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The Asian Champions League began on Tuesday. It’s just like the Champions League in Europe, except about 10 percent as lucrative. But who knows, someday it could be as big. Hard to imagine, now, but … Whatever the financial ramifications or the television ratings, the Asian Champions League is fun because it is exotic. It […]

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