Dubai International Airport has moved up to No. 2 in the world for international departures. Thus, if you travel enough, even from the United States, the likelihood is increasing that you will land in Dubai. This is not hard to figure out. Asia’s east and its subcontinent have been the sites of much of the […]

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I am not too obstinate — OK, sometimes I am — to concede when I got one wrong. Or at least partly wrong. In January, I was certain David Beckham had picked the wrong club to join for the “one last challenge” he spoke of when he left the L.A. Galaxy, in December. That club […]

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For Lent, I gave up Snickers candy bars. That may not seem like a very significant, nor a serious, Lenten sacrifice … and it is not, cosmically. But it is, for me. I consider Snickers the best candy bar ever invented. Whatever is second is a distant second. Maybe the Baby Ruth. As a candy, […]

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Searching my memory, but I am not sure I had really grasped, pre-UAE, that the main event of the Dubai World Cup offered the biggest cash prize of any horse race/meet. The race is worth $10 million, with $6 million going to the winner. That’s a lot of oats and alfalfa. The Dubai World Cup […]

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I appreciate classical music as much as your average First World old guy, and perhaps more. However, not much of it is played live in Abu Dhabi, or the UAE. For obvious reasons. The Western classical canon is not prominent here and the Dead White Males of orchestral prominence are not guys the Gulf Arabs […]

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Back in December, I confessed to my deep and only semi-rational need to see Adrian Peterson fall short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season NFL rushing record. (And he did, in part because I willed it; that’s how fans think.) Here’s one I probably care about more: The Lakers’ NBA record of 33 consecutive victories.

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For a period of about 20 years, from 1989 until 2009, I saw nearly every match the U.S. national soccer team played. Many of them in person. Most of the rest via television. I knew those teams, especially those from the World Cup teams of 1990 through 2002, as well as I have ever known […]

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Sometimes, the UAE can seem like a fairly regular place. For days at a time. People have jobs, they go to work, they encounter traffic along the way, they watch sports on TV, they plan vacations … And then we get a story in The National that reminds us that we live among a very […]

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I have suggested on this blog that college sports are hard to follow, overseas. They are. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the notion of “sports” affiliated with “college” does not seem ridiculous. Thus, once you leave the U.S., you are confronted with confusion and disinterest, as pertains to […]

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The London Times once had the same reputation in Britain that the New York Times has in the States. The emphasis here being “once” … as in “bygone days”. Britons were clearly proud of it. And still are, almost instinctively. They refer to it still as “The Times” … as if there is only one […]

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