I’d had the idea, for a couple of decades, that not seeing the rom-com Sleepless in Seattle, circa 1993, was a blot on my movie-viewing career. I am a fan of When Harry Met Sally, and Nora Ephron wrote that movie as well as Sleepless. Meg Ryan played the female lead in both movies, and […]

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The Baltimore Orioles’ game with the Chicago White Sox at Camden Yards was played today without any fans in the stadium. It came about because of a city curfew, following civil unrest, and the teams involved not wanting to get too many games behind schedule. The White Sox have three games to make up, I […]

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In the past year or two, the National Football League has been dragged into conceding concussions are a bad idea. Having your brain bang around inside your skull … turns out it’s bad. But we are finding that concussions are nearly inevitable in the game, and with more and more evidence/opinion seeming to suggest that […]

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The topic of passports comes up fairly often in the UAE, probably because about 90 percent of everyone here is a citizen of a country that is not the United Arab Emirates. You live here long enough, and you begin to notice and appreciate a strong passport. United States and United Kingdom passports are, at […]

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I blame TBDBITL for this one, a march rarely played anywhere by anyone. Except by Ohio State University‘s marching band, modestly known on that campus as The Best Damn Band in the Land — or TBDBITL. It is a French tune nearly 140 years old, literally a marching song, back when the French were considered […]

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Two signs of status in the UAE: 1. A license plate with three digits or fewer. 2. A mobile phone with a “distinctive” number. Like, say, 052 222 2222. One Emirati liked that number so much that he won a bidding war for it tonight and is handing over to a local telecom 8,010,000 dirhams […]

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Furious 7, the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise, reached movie theaters here about three weeks ago. The movies are silly, brainless fun, and I have seen just about all of them now. (Aside from Tokyo Drift, which lacks the key stars, aside from a cameo by Vin Diesel late in […]

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I was looking up some statistics on Josh Reddick, outfielder of the Oakland Athletics, in the marvelous online resource baseball-reference.com, and just above players’ numbers the site has a sort of “ticker” of where that particular player ranks, in baseball history. Josh Reddick, I noted, was #1439. And a bit to the right of Josh […]

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It’s nice to see someone who is struggling score a big goal. Even if it was fairly easy. Even if his teammates did most of the work. Like, say, Javier Hernandez, who scored in the 87th minute tonight to lift Real Madrid past Atletico Madrid and into the Champions League semifinals. It was the only […]

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The National regularly writes about the results of the annual Arab Youth Survey. A variety of questions are posed to people in the 18-to-24 age group across North Africa and the Middle East, the Arab homeland, and the results are collated. The total number of youths surveyed was 3,500, including 300 from the UAE. One […]

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