We Americans living in the UAE often are asked, by friends and relatives back home: “Isn’t it dangerous?”

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An advantage to living outside the U.S., at this point in history, is the ability to ignore most of the horror of what has become the American electoral process. When November rolls around?

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According to weather.com, at 2:24 p.m. local time today … the temperature in the UAE capital was 100 Fahrenheit. Toasty. But here’s the key:

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Upon entry at the Los Angeles Angels home game on Thursday, each ticket-holder was handed a plastic red “Angels pitcher”, and inside were four white plastic Angels cups. The cups had the names of four members of the Angels’ starting rotation, and their numbers: “Santana 54” … “Weaver 36” … “Wilson 33” … “Haren 24”. […]

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Always nice to come home, but also a little melancholy. The economic dislocation of the region can be followed from Abu Dhabi, but not really felt without being in SoCal. The recession was almost two years old when I left for the UAE in October of 2009. And the SoCal economy seems hardly better — […]

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Third night visiting in SoCal, and I was at the yard. That’s what you do when you’re an American expatriate and get home for any length of time. You go to the yard. Angels Stadium, in this case. To bask in the baseball atmosphere, which is a very specific sports sensation — a sort of […]

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I was once one of those people who was convinced no “real” Mexican food could be found in large swaths of the U.S. “Too far from the border” was our (let’s be honest) smug explanation, and for a long time it was pretty much true. No more.

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Consider yourself fortunate if most of your air travel is international. Going across an ocean or a major sea … is generally still not awful. Practically every airline in the world is a meaner, coarser version of what it was a generation ago, but generally less mean and less coarse on long hauls. To fly […]

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Desert-dwellers love green. The color. But particularly the notion of living flora. Grass. Leaves. Trees. Shrubs. Because where we live, nothing like that occurs in nature. It can be replicated, at significant cost, and with prodigious amounts of desalinated water, but otherwise … our natural world is 100 shades of brown. So, a place like […]

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I know this is not ecumenical. I know it’s retro. But I am a child of the Cold War, and we treasured Olympic medals like … well, gold … back then, and kept close tabs of where they went. And I have never given it up. I am always aware of who leads the medals […]

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