Most major movies made in Hollywood make their way to the UAE, sometimes opening on the same day as they do in the U.S. But certain movies … Well, you can’t really plan on seeing them in Abu Dhabi. Which is why we spent two of the past three evenings in Southern California theaters. The […]

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A lesson on how bad the drought has been in the “Golden (tilting towards brown) State”. It rained here today, and Californians were more joyful, verging on giddy, in reacting to it than are Emiratis, for whom rain is even more rare. We were on Fletcher Avenue, behind Griffith Park in Los Angeles, when we […]

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Day 1 in the Southern California visit and it seems like it always did, except more so. More people, more cars, more money needed to go grocery shopping. Looking at four lanes of traffic at a standstill on the southbound 5, and it’s not even noon, and it is hard to imagine I dealt with […]

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I was not born in San Bernardino. I didn’t go to school there. I lived inside the city limits only a few years. Pretty sure I won’t die there. But I worked there as a journalist for more than three decades, and during that stretch of time I felt like I knew the city pretty […]

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Jerry Tarkanian died today at the age of 84, and the volume of pieces written about him by sports journalists has been impressive. Nearly all of it, however, focuses on his time at UNLV, which certainly was interesting, and lasted 19 seasons. For me, however, he will always be the coach who put Long Beach […]

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We have stipulated jet lag just kicks my butt. At least, it does going west to east and crossing 10 or more time zones. I have remarked upon this several times, since we have been based in Abu Dhabi. Going from here to SoCal? Not a huge problem. But going from California to the eastern […]

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The city of Long Beach comes in for a lot of criticism. Some of it from me. But it has some things going for it. Particularly down by the Pacific Ocean. We spent our last night in California in Long Beach, and were glad to do so. Some scenery, some dinner, some Christmas lights.

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Aside from four months in Hong Kong, six years ago, I have never spent any stretch of time in a rainy environment. Abu Dhabi gets maybe two inches of rain a year. Often in the span of a few hours. But something less than two inches over the course of a year is not uncommon. […]

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For most of my time in Southern California, Irvine was a place you drove through on the way from Long Beach to San Diego. When I was young, we knew Irvine as a lake, not a city. Where the eighth-graders got to spend a day skylarking. To us, it was deep in the country, somewhere […]

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Day 1 of a Southern California visit. Almost as warm as Abu Dhabi. Not nearly as wet.

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