This is a real story from a real newspaper. If you have been poking around in the Pan-Arabia Enquirer satire site discussed yesterday, you can be forgiven for assuming that the story I’m about to link you to is not real, either. We will start by teasing you with the online headline in The National: […]

[Read more →]

I can’t speak for the rate of religious observance among Muslims outside the UAE. I suspect it is more intense in, say, Saudi Arabia and perhaps Qatar and Afghanistan, and perhaps something less intense just about everywhere where. But I can vouch for the fact that a significant number of the people living and working […]

[Read more →]

The level of soccer in the UAE is often denigrated by the sport’s local cognoscenti.Both foreign and domestic. They seem to believe it should compare to top European leagues, which is unrealistic given that each team is limited to four expatriates, and the rest of the squad comes from an Emirati male population of about […]

[Read more →]

I am editing sports copy tonight. I have been at The National in Abu Dhabi long enough to recognize that our newspaper is most interested in the British sports suite — which includes cricket, rugby, snooker and (I kid you not) darts. But I have been through several particularly “inside snooker” sorts of stories tonight, […]

[Read more →]

The UAE is close to Iran. Uncomfortably close. The erratic and bellicose behavior of the Ahmadinejad regime is a cause for consternation in the West. Might Iran have nuclear devices? Could Iran strike Israel with a nuke-armed missile? Those questions hit much closer to home, here in the UAE, because Iran is much closer to […]

[Read more →]

Perhaps you have experienced the feeling. You see a day on the calendar and you think, “This date is familiar, but I can’t remember why.” If you are lucky, it doesn’t turn out to be your anniversary or your mom’s birthday. So, exactly 2.5 years to the day that we left the United States for […]

[Read more →]

The Titanic struck an iceberg 100 years ago tonight, and sunk in the early hours of tomorrow, April 15. This has fascinated me since I was a child and reading those little 16-volume encyclopedia sets that U.S. supermarkets sold for $1 per volume, if you bought enough groceries. And unlike many of my historical fascinations, […]

[Read more →]

This is the first Friday the 13th in something like 40 years that I have faced without my “lucky” coin.

[Read more →]

We do not lack for sand, here in the UAE. The whole country is sand, essentially. Except for some rocks up in the north. Anyway, we don’t need more sand. We don’t need what we already have to be strirred up. But we got that today. Check out the story via this link. Then we […]

[Read more →]

This was how it was supposed to work: That weasel Frank McCourt would sell the Dodgers and I would immediately resume a powerful interest in the club. I would again know the identities of every man on the roster, with opinions on all of them, and my moods could be least be slightly brightened or […]

[Read more →]