This weekend we went past the 1.5-year mark of living and working here in the UAE. We have learned much, and some of it is profound and different. Some of it is very small and different. Here’s a curious/silly one:

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One of those whatever-could-go-wrong … did-go-wrong games. Anyone who has spent any time in sports journalism probably can anticipate several of the directions in which this is going. Big game, isolated stadium, late start, game-changing scoring in the last seconds, basic error of fact not caught, late newspaper. This one had it all.

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It’s a curious fact here: Local sports news dries up markedly once we hit April. The European golf tour has come and gone, twice. The men and women of world tennis have been through the UAE with back-to-back events in Dubai. A batch of Premier League clubs dropped by for a little bit of sun […]

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I saw the other day that gas prices in California are over $4 a gallon. Wow. That’s crossed the pain threshold, hasn’t it? But maybe that’s good. Here in Abu Dhabi, gas is about $1.80 a gallon. It doesn’t rise or fall, unless the government decides it’s time to change. I’m sure it costs less […]

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As noted a day ago, this is a country in which the citizens are a small minority of the population. Expats often are encouraged to get to know an Emirati, but it’s not as easy as thinking, “OK, I’ll do that!” Not when most of the Emiratis you see are inside their SUVs, driving down […]

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Curious country, the United Arab Emirates. Expatriates … foreigners, that is … have far outnumbered Emiratis here for a while now, but the ratio continues to climb. Only a handful of countries in the world have more expatriates than citizens, and the UAE and Qatar seem to lead the way. According to numbers provided by […]

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My daughter sent me a link containing a slide show with photos from around the world of employees sitting behind their desks. If you have a desk job, and most of us do, you might find it interesting to compare the setting around your office work and those all over the planet, from Bolivia to […]

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Back in the IE, it was not unusual for me to have three bylines in one edition. It was fairly common, actually. Column, gamer, notebook. It also wasn’t rare to add a sidebar to that. If time availed and I was alone at an event we cared about. Here at The National, as in SoCal, […]

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Violence in Dodger Stadium, and commenting on it, certainly has caused a stir. If you want to see what sort of stir, look at the item from this blog and the 15 comments (and counting) I have been able to post. (Rather than edit those with obscenities, I don’t run them.) A few Dodgers fans […]

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This was an issue before I fled the country. Actually, it has been an issue for about 10 years now. Going to a game at Dodger Stadium can be just … plain … dangerous. It appears that two men dressed in Dodgers apparel attacked a Giants fan after the game on Opening Day and beat […]

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