To celebrate Eid Eve, the Day after Labor Day and the Jewish New Year — and I venture to say no other group of people on the planet had that combination of events in mind at the same event — we invited over five people for … Mexican food! They hardly do Mexican in the […]

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Almost every sports fan in the world is interested in his or her national soccer team. Certainly applies in the UAE, where the most casual of supporters can tell you where and when the UAE appeared in its first (and still only) World Cup. That would be Italy, 1990. The UAE went out in three […]

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Fasting from sunup to sundown, not an easy thing. I was chatting about this with our backup cabbie, Jesse, a Filipino grandfather who loves Country and Western music. And he had an interesting take on the rogue-cab-driver situation I referred to the other night. He has a suggestion for the horrific driving we’ve seen the […]

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Brazil is big on referring to athletes by just one name. Which I don’t have a problem with, generally, and especially not for athletes. Their given names,  Portuguese-based most of them, tend to be elaborate affairs. Pele, the most famous Brazilian of them all, was christened Edson Arantes de Nascimento, which is a lot of […]

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First, the good news: USC 49, Hawaii 36. And now the bad: Matt Leinart released by the Arizona Cardinals. How the great have fallen. First the on-probation Trojans. Now Matt. It’s almost as if that whole mid-decade USC team is having its history rewritten, and not in a flattering way. Reggie Bush cheated. Pete Carroll […]

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Today we link you to what I found to be two supremely interesting recordings of Sports People talking. I was thinking how the concept of the podcast and the videocast (is that the word?) are still fairly recent, in the larger scheme. Podcasts really gained traction only about a decade ago, and video of people […]

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Been dealing with cabbies since the night we arrived. Caught one in the middle of Najda Street an hour after touching down. Cabs become a part of your life here, unless you take on the risky/expensive proposition of driving yourself. What you ought to do is make an arrangement with a cabbie you like and […]

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My daughter Britt sent me an interesting photo. Shot by National Geographic. It is No. 4 in this group of photos. What strikes me as interesting about this is …

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I have been given the job of organizing coverage of the local professional soccer league, which is known at The National as the Pro League. I am impressed by how many UAE nationals play in the league of 12 teams, considering the Emirati population is only around 1 million, which means perhaps 500,000 males and […]

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Wow. That looked miserable. Actually, it looked scary. Professional soccer,  and all that running and sprinting and just maximum exertion … in temperatures described by weather.com as “93, feels like 113.” That was what we had going on here in Abu Dhabi tonight when Al Jazira played Al Nasr on Day 2 of the local […]

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