The calls and emails began coming into the newsroom a bit before 4 p.m. “Did something just happen? Was that … an earthquake?” One person’s email read: “What should I do?” This is a country with a large number of people who know earthquakes only as events that happen elsewhere. Particularly Emiratis and Britons, whose […]

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The Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge falls dead-center in the “work with what you got” line of thought. And what does Abu Dhabi have a lot of? Sand. Miles and miles and miles of it. Mountains of it. In deserts that are not just waste areas, but actual dunes, moving and shifting and drifting almost like […]

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A lot of us in the first half of the Baby Boom generation are having some trouble with all this new-fangled technology stuff that is swamping the developed world. Certainly, it is playing hob with my brain. The inspiration for this was casting my eyes on a stick of what we once called Wite-Out — […]

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This is a sad story. But it also has elements of fairy tales. As well as lies. Some of them sad, pathetic lies … some more along the lines of a lack of “truth in advertising”. The National has done a story about the phenomenon of migrant workers here paying for fake/doctored photos — which […]

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Summer appears to have come early in the UAE, but April can be hot. We know it. We can’t really complain about it. The average high temperature in April in Abu Dhabi is 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Warmer than most humans prefer. The summer which, for practical purposes we have entered, also is the time of […]

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Abu Dhabi is not an easy place to get a salad. Not as Americans would recognize it. Which is a little odd, because not much will grow in the forbidding climate of the UAE, but lettuce is on the list. Lots of water, lots of heat. That, we have here, same as the Coachella Valley. […]

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Dubai International Airport has moved up to No. 2 in the world for international departures. Thus, if you travel enough, even from the United States, the likelihood is increasing that you will land in Dubai. This is not hard to figure out. Asia’s east and its subcontinent have been the sites of much of the […]

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I am not too obstinate — OK, sometimes I am — to concede when I got one wrong. Or at least partly wrong. In January, I was certain David Beckham had picked the wrong club to join for the “one last challenge” he spoke of when he left the L.A. Galaxy, in December. That club […]

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And you thought a crossword puzzle was a lawless place? An unseeable place — like the inside of your brain — where you make up your own rules? Ha. The game has rules. You know it. We know it. They just are not written down anywhere. So I am going to do that now. To […]

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