For those of us who did not live in temperate climes, and that is most of us, the winter solstice is a big moment. Especially in the northern hemisphere, where the days are about to get longer. The winter solstice generally is December 21, and it was, here in Abu Dhabi. It was the shortest […]

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Americans and milk chocolate. What a deep and awful relationship. Did Hershey’s chocolate sell dark chocolate, until the past few years? Did any of us eat anything but milk chocolate? I remember when a Hershey bar in my lunch was a wonderful thing. Milk chocolate, of course. Like Hershey Kisses. I also can remember giving […]

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Check out this news release on the Los Angeles Dodgers website. They are very proud of their prominence in social media. Look at all the numbers! –They had 193,493 new Twitter followers. –Exactly 30,849,622 “likes” on Instagram, 373,072 comments and 309,314 new followers of the @Dodgers account. –An MLB-leading 1,588,291 Twitter retweets from January to […]

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Who knew? I did not. I knew that Pau Gasol was a polite and intelligent guy, from my days of covering the Los Angeles Lakers. A Catalan, from Spain, but whose English was very good. Parents both involved in medicine. And the 7-foot thing, with a small man’s dexterity. I knew that teammates liked him, […]

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Bizarre story of the day: One of Australia’s top cricket batsmen, flush with success in the ongoing Ashes Test series, is considering taking up baseball. David Warner has pummeled the English in the five-Test series, which Australia already has clinched by winning the first three Tests. It must have been one of those “new worlds […]

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“Sack” is a particularly British word. Used little, if at all, in North America, outside the circles of the New World’s Premier League acolytes. It means “to fire”. To dismiss. To give the boot. To make redundant. (Oops; another Britishism.) I’m not sure either league is aware of it, but I sense an international soccer […]

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Well, actually, it’s camel season the year round, here in the Gulf. The aficionados talk about the ships of the desert all the time. But winter is when it goes to another level, in the UAE, because of the Al Dhafra Festival, where the biggest “camel beauty contests” are held each year. The news this […]

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Struck me, while walking to the nearby “public garden” today, that I had never been in a park, in Abu Dhabi. Not in four years. How could that be? –Half the year, it’s too hot in Abu Dhabi to be outdoors. You would go to a park, from May through October, only if you were […]

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I “self-identify” as an Arsenal fan. This goes back years and years, all the way back to, oh, 2010, when I figured out I was an Arsenal fan without ever having made a conscious decision on the matter. Now that I am a fan of three years standing (albeit one who has never seen Arsenal […]

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Into Year 5 here and I had never been inside the Abu Dhabi Country Club, even though I lived barely a mile from it for three years. That issue was addressed tonight during a sort of staff holiday party. The second leg of the festivities, where those of us who had been putting out the […]

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