The good news: Colton High School had three of its alumni selected in the NFL draft last month: Allen Bradford, Shareece Wright and James Smith, something no other high school managed this year. The bad news: In the fall of 2005 all three of those elite players were on the same team … which lost […]

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A co-worker of mine, a decade-plus ago, liked to announce, with mock solemnity, when things seemed completely out of control as we plunged towards the Armageddon of deadline: “Everything is falling into place …” Of course, often we had no particular plan, and how it came together was rather random. But his pronouncement inevitably made […]

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I failed to mention in my previous post that Snoop Dogg is from Long Beach, California, as am I. But, then, Long Beach doesn’t come up much in local conversation. So what were the odds of consecutive days with Long Beach-oriented news making its way over here? Long. Today’s news? UAE officials were in Long […]

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I suppose pop/rock/rap performers have been shocking traditionalists and old folks for decades now, going back at least to Elvis. Rappers have taken it to another level, and even as he creeps up on age 40 the performer known as Snoop Dogg managed to scandalize when he played here in Abu Dhabi over the weekend. […]

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Even over here in the UAE, we know the Lakers are being dissected and deconstructed, and the prevailing notion seems to be that they need to be disassembled. My first thoughts, and these go back to when the deficit to Dallas was 2-0, were “maybe they do need to blow it up.” But then I […]

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A curious yet predictable part of the “Osama Bin Laden whacking” was the immediate chorus of people who wanted “proof” that he was dead. One of them is a colleague of mine at The National, who in an op-ed piece that ran today said just that: “I would like to see some proof …” Well, […]

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I may have done this before … just turned over a blog entry to the analysis of a former colleague. In this case, it pertains to the Lakers, who are down 2-0 to the Dallas Mavericks and look unlikely to survive this round. How can they be losing to a one-man Dallas team? That is […]

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The expression “the Arab Street” is misleading. It’s the regional equivalent of Main Street USA, and just as imprecise. That doesn’t stop journalists and pundits from trying to distill a sense of what the average Arab is thinking about an issue — even though the Arab Street begins in Morocco (or Dearborn, Michigan, for that […]

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We found out about it this morning, about 9:30, when we began our day. How old was the news at that point? Not very. Leah beat me to the web and announced, “Osama bin Laden is dead.” I may have said, “Huh.” It was not a moment of high emotion for me. I was already […]

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Maybe it’s Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium. I’ve seen quite a bit of wacky stuff go down there. Two riveting matches in a week. The aforementioned Jazira 5, Dhafra 3 in the Pro League, and now an Etisalat Cup final between Al Shabab and Al Ain that featured three goals from the 86th minute or later. […]

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