When you live outside your country of origin, you soon notice that a whole new batch of destinations are within a “reasonable” plane trip. Which begins to explain why we are now in the little town of Koggala, Sri Lanka. Well, and for some other good reasons.

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The Libyan civil war apparently ended today with the collapse of the last loyalist stronghold and the death of Muammar Qaddafi, all around weird guy and former president/leader/king of kings/dictator of Libya. It was a weird afternoon, in the offices of The National, in Abu Dhabi. Early in the day came reports that the last […]

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Yaaaawn. That’s the reaction to the World Series from over here. Well, that or just generic befuddlement. A significant number of people in this part of the world, Arabs and subcontinenters both, know basically nothing about baseball. I mean, they may not even know the game exists, let alone that Americans and some other random […]

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Like a lot of sports-oriented people, I have a numbers thing. I think about numerals a lot. If I were to play a sport, I have preferred numbers. A different set for baseball, football, basketball. I will always have an opinion on a phone number, if I am given a choice. “This” number will be […]

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Don’t read this if you are not a current or former professional journalist … and a writer/reporter, in particular. You will be bored. Too “inside baseball.” Too much about the logistics of the business. The sort of thing that reporters sit around and talk about late at night with “I can top that!” discussions their […]

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It was two years ago today, October 16, 2009, that we got off the plane at Abu Dhabi International Airport and picked up our duffel bags stuffed with clothes meant to last us … indefinitely. We have spent two years, then, working at The National and living in the UAE. A fair chunk of time. […]

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When I reported on the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, I made a point of going over to the Plaza Monumental to see the bullfights. How I found the 2-3 hours of waking daylight to escape to the corrida, during a Summer Games … I don’t clearly remember. It was my first afternoon at the bullfights, […]

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If I have left you with the impression that the UAE — Abu Dhabi, in particular — is all work and no play, millions of nose-to-the-grindstone people with old-fashioned values … well, that would be wrong. This is a country that loves celebrity and pop culture as much as any and perhaps more than most. […]

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It’s fascinating to consider the many changes that have occurred in journalism over the past three or four decades. Particularly on the topic of “how we file our stories from remote locations.” When I first entered the profession, we typically filed via a primitive form of early faxing — a machine that scanned typewritten pages […]

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Well, this is a bit awkward. The UAE women’s national team tonight won their second West Asian Football Federation championship, following up on the title they won at the last WAFF tournament, in early 2010. What we have here is something Americans could recognize: Compared to their rivals, the women’s national soccer team appears to […]

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