It is surprising how many people living in the UAE are eager to visit Las Vegas. No need to make that 20-hour trip. All the locals need do is check in to Atlantis The Palm in Dubai, and they can enjoy the whole of the mainstream Las Vegas experience — aside from the gambling, that […]

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I pretty much gave up advocating the dismissal of coaches and managers a decade ago. Maybe more. I make an exception for Jurgen Klinsmann. This man is doing so much harm to U.S. soccer that every day he mismanages this team leaves them in a deeper hole from which they must eventually climb. The 4-1 […]

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Qualifying for the 2018 World Cup is really the only international sports story of any significance in the UAE over the next two years. Some runners, swimmers and shooters will go to the Rio Olympics, the government is crazy about jiu-jitsu, various global golf and tennis and cycling tours will pass through the country between […]

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We like where we live. Quite a bit. Particularly given where we lived the first three years in Abu Dhabi. “Functional” would be the biggest compliment we could pay those two apartments. Where we are now is a tower of about 20 stories. Maybe four years old. With a gym, a swimming pool and several […]

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Actually, we’re pushing 60 percent finished with the current decade, given that we persist in starting decades and centuries and millennia on years that end in zero. (Digression alert!) And, by the by, what are we calling this decade? Apparently we haven’t decided because it’s varieties of stupid/awkward. Back in 2009, the BBC did a […]

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Forty-five UAE soldiers were killed in Yemen yesterday and the government has called for three days of mourning. One of the hallmarks of a mourning period here is “no pop music” on the radio. Which has led to lots and lots of classical. Which led to us being in the car when one of my […]

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This is one of those random events you sometimes experience on YouTube. You begin by looking for one thing, and then you follow a few more, and in not all that many minutes you stumble across something you didn’t plan to play — and didn’t know existed. Such as 10,000 Japanese performing the fourth movement […]

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The routs rolled across the world’s biggest continent. Iraq 5, Chinese Taipei 1. South Korea 8, Laos 0. Iran 6, Guam 0. UAE 10, Malaysia 0. Qatar 15, Bhutan 0. And that last one eclipsed a couple more blowouts that came slightly later: Kuwait 9, Myanmar 0, and Saudi Arabia 7, East Timor 0. At […]

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Maybe this delayed insight is mostly a function of advancing years on the part of the author. Or self-recognition of some new twinges and extrapolations, going forward. But it comes down to this: What I once thought was an aversion to exercise among some older people?

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So, giving more thought to the phenomenon that is Vin Scully … The secret to his popularity, I believe, lies in two areas. –His voice. It is a pleasure to hear. Well-modulated, mellifluous. Never shouting, never mumbling, easy to understand, easy on the ear. The voice of a natural storyteller. –His words. Scully uses proper […]

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