This is the worst yet. Most of the first four years here in the UAE, we were able to see some college football. We had access to ESPN and ESPN America, which showed a bit of the college game.  Pretty much all the games that ran on ESPN in the U.S., and it was a […]

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The UAE leans toward traditions and styles preferred by some of the elite European leagues, so the local Super Cup is rather like those of several other countries. The defending league champion plays the defending cup champion (in this case, the President’s Cup; in England, the FA Cup) in a match that kicks off the […]

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We went three years in Abu Dhabi without a car. Aside from a one- or two-day rental for work. Then we did about 10 months renting a little car, by the month, from a local agency. Today, we took the plunge into car ownership in the UAE. That (above) is the vehicle we purchased, from […]

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Earlier this month, the story was that Landon Donovan might look for a move to Europe at the end of the year, when his current four-year, $10 million deal with the L.A. Galaxy ran out. It didn’t sound quite right. Landon is 31, which is about the time that Europe’s top leagues look to part […]

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Syria is a bloody mess. An evil regime, rebels who may now be more terrorists than reformists (let alone democrats), millions of refugees and more than 100,000 people dead, and some of them victims of chemical weapons. Here, in the Middle East, the U.S. is often reviled for what it does. Now it is being […]

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If you have seen one World Cup soccer draw, you have seen them all. A vague attempt at some entertainment, a Fifa official droning on, someone from the host country talking a bit too long, then the puzzling, almost impenetrable dance of the ping pong bowls inside the giant goldfish bowls manned by celebrity presenters. […]

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With all due respect to Nick Nolte and the late James Brown, I advance my candidacy for having been the focus of The Worst Mugshot Ever. It is, perhaps, a universal vanity among humans that, inside our heads, we present a more handsome image than, in fact, we often do. And then if we exacerbate […]

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I take it, from the other side of the world, that the narrative in Los Angeles remains this: Yasiel Puig is a baseball superstar. Or a star, anyway. Or so we thought. Now, I am not so certain. And maybe this has been noted already, several times, and I have not seen it … but […]

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It had never occurred to me. That Vin Scully’s hair might not be his own. It required a British colleague, at The National, to make me confront this. He had seen a photo of the Dodgers broadcaster on a page proof; I had run a small story on our two-page lighter-side-of-sports package in The National, […]

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It’s taken me decades to figure this out. Oranges were a treat, in much of the Western World, for at least the first half of the 20th century.

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