The United Arab Emirates is a distant doppelganger to Southern California, when it comes to cars. They love their wheels here. Love them. Mass transit here is buses. Not a rail line in the country, that I know of, though the government apparently is considering a high-speed rail link between the country’s major coastal cities. […]

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I’ve written fairly often about Diego Maradona. I know that. Almost unavoidable. El Diego coaches the Al Wasl team up in Dubai, and I cover a lot of domestic soccer/football here in the UAE. So Diego comes up a lot. We are trying to find the latest answer to the great sports question: How rare […]

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How many of the readers of this blog think “Securities and Exchange Commision” when they see SEC? Yeah, I figure “zero” too. Anyway, the SEC got its all-Southeastern Conference (imagine the first E in Southeastern is capitalized) BCS championship football game … and we got a horrifically dull event. Can we agree on this? When […]

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It was about 5 a.m. at this end of the Arabian Peninsula when Tim Tebow hooked up with Demaryius Thomas on the 80-yard scoring pass on the first play of overtime, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers 29-23 in the playoffs. By the time I got to the offices of The National later in the morning, something […]

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Getting old. It isn’t all bad news. Mostly, it is. Sure. But not entirely. Past a certain threshold you get breaks on tickets at museums and concerts, etc., and you can collect Social Security, in the U.S., if the system hasn’t yet gone bankrupt. Another significant advantage pops up on the “literature” side of things. […]

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Well, 6.6 pounds lighter, to be exact. And it didn’t involve violent illness or amputation. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I weigh myself fairly regularly. Not that any of us really need to do that. Because if the clothes that used to fit don’t fit anymore … we’ve lost weight. Or, […]

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Kobe Bryant ranks third in the NBA in scoring, so far, at 26.4 points per game. But the Lakers are 4-4, and are beginning to have the feel of a .500 team. Are these concepts related? Well, yes. In that the Lakers have managed to win four games … but have contrived to lose four. […]

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The big story in the offices of The National here in Abu Dhabi today … or most talked about, anyway … was the bar tab at a Dubai nightclub for 387,988 dirhams — or $105,638. Dubai is the biggest city in the UAE, and the best-known — which kills people in Abu Dhabi, the actual […]

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This was a first: A Briton asking me to write a story about Landon Donovan. The news peg is that Landon is back in England, for two months, on loan with the Premier League side Everton, and he seems likely to play his first match (in his second Everton go-round) Wednesday night. Here is that […]

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I actually know only one person who attended Stanford, and as I watched the second half of the Fiesta Bowl at 8 a.m. UAE time, I was thinking of his (and other Stanford fans) suffering. Frankie, my condolences. I feel your pain. Fourth-ranked Stanford contrived to lose to third-ranked Oklahoma State, 41-38, in overtime, in […]

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