I have reached a point where I read nearly everything I like twice. Three times, even. Talking about books here. I would rather go back and reexamine something I consumed a year ago, or decades ago, than take a chance on something new. (Unless it comes with overwhelmingly enthusiastic recommendations from people I trust.) I […]

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It’s one of those stories that prompts an immediate reaction. “Are you sure you heard that right?” Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, is the No. 4 city in the world, behind only New York, London and Paris, according to a survey of more than 18,000 people from 24 countries around the world, including the […]

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Five days. That’s how long it took for the Audi to go dead on me. Five days. Bought it on Thursday, was sitting in a dead Audi on Tuesday. In the middle of the day. In 110-degree heat. Far from home. Of this I can be sure: Never did I imagine I would be pushing […]

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So, the new old car. Did I mention it has tinted windows? Which is pretty much how we roll, here in the UAE. Anyone who is anybody, and some of us who are not, want our windows tinted. To cut down on the sun pouring into the interior of a car and overheating it in […]

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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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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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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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