Time for a list. And why not some random facts from our home in the Gulf. 1. The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi claims that 5 kg of pure edible gold is used at the hotel per year, mostly on desserts. Five kilograms is 10.1 pounds. At this writing, gold costs $1,648 per ounce. […]

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I am fairly sensitive to this. I lived in The 909 for much of my life, and in southern California 909 was considered the worst possible telephone area-code prefix to have — because it encompassed a region with economic issues, significant crime rates and some of the worst air in the world. A few years […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States: Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages. Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total […]

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Hmm. Three Easters, now, spent in the UAE, an overwhelmingly Muslim country. And I have done the same thing three years running. I suppose that makes it a tradition. I again walked over to St. Andrews, the Anglican church near where I live, for the Maundy Thursday service, and by searching the word “Maundy” (which […]

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Five years ago I might have watched consecutive baseball games on television. Or consecutive basketball games.Today and yesterday … I watched consecutive soccer games, on TV. Involving UAE teams. Teams I didn’t know existed three years ago. It’s my job. More or less. I wasn’t covering any of these games. But even if I’m not […]

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A couple of days ago we broached the topic of big cats in the UAE, and all that it means … most of it bad. In this piece today a writer for The National addresses head-on the concept that it is legal for people here to own big cats of the lion-tiger-cheetah sort, and outlines […]

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No. Not an April Fool’s joke. Every six months or so, we at The National have a story like this: “Big cat found in city streets.” And we’re not talking about an overgrown tabby. These are the real deal. Lions and cheetahs, in particular, often brought into the country illegally, apparently for the amusement of […]

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The two biggest international sports events in the UAE neatly bracket the start and finish of the “winter” sports calendar here: The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November and the Dubai World Cup in March. The former involves Formula One race cars and the latter horses. In each case, people are trying to get from […]

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When the Al Wasl club of Dubai and the UAE Pro League announced in June that they had hired Diego Maradona to be their coach … I wrote that “this will not be dull.” Got that one right. But that was shooting fish in a barrel. El Diego, FIFA’s co-player of the century (with Pele), […]

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When I arrived in the UAE, I figured I would never go to a dentist here. Bar some emergency. A doctor, sure, for an antibiotic or asthma medication or a checkup. But not a dentist. We were going to be here 18 months, maybe two years on the outside … but now we are safely […]

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