One of the great urban myths from the days shortly after we arrived … was the “abandoned luxury car at the Dubai airport.”
The narrative was this: High-flying foreign investor, realizes things have gone south as the real estate market implodes, well aware that white-collar crime is often heavily punished here … goes to the airport, […]

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The most successful soccer club in the country is Al Ain FC, which happens to be located in the UAE’s version of suburbia, Al Ain City.
Al Ain FC secured its 10th league title tonight in a 2-0 spanking of Al Jazira, the defending champions, who couldn’t be bothered to play hard.
And UAE suburbia erupted with […]

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I love the President’s Cup final.
It’s a major domestic soccer game, the local version of England’s FA Cup final. But what I really find fascinating is how big this is with the Emirati populace.
This attracts regular guys in big numbers, but it also attracts many of the most prominent sheikhs in the country — in […]

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This is a real story from a real newspaper.
If you have been poking around in the Pan-Arabia Enquirer satire site discussed yesterday, you can be forgiven for assuming that the story I’m about to link you to is not real, either.
We will start by teasing you with the online headline in The National:
“Man ‘did not […]

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I can’t speak for the rate of religious observance among Muslims outside the UAE. I suspect it is more intense in, say, Saudi Arabia and perhaps Qatar and Afghanistan, and perhaps something less intense just about everywhere where.
But I can vouch for the fact that a significant number of the people living and working here […]

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I would guess this received very little attention in the U.S., but India yesterday launched a missile with a range of 3,100 miles.
That means that missiles armed with nuclear devices launched from the north of India could reach Beijing, Moscow and Africa.
North America and even western Europe may not have taken notice of India’s rocket […]

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The UAE is close to Iran. Uncomfortably close.
The erratic and bellicose behavior of the Ahmadinejad regime is a cause for consternation in the West. Might Iran have nuclear devices? Could Iran strike Israel with a nuke-armed missile?
Those questions hit much closer to home, here in the UAE, because Iran is much closer to home: It […]

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The Titanic struck an iceberg 100 years ago tonight, and sunk in the early hours of tomorrow, April 15.
This has fascinated me since I was a child and reading those little 16-volume encyclopedia sets that U.S. supermarkets sold for $1 per volume, if you bought enough groceries.
And unlike many of my historical fascinations, this one […]

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This is the first Friday the 13th in something like 40 years that I have faced without my “lucky” coin.

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We do not lack for sand, here in the UAE. The whole country is sand, essentially. Except for some rocks up in the north.
Anyway, we don’t need more sand. We don’t need what we already have to be strirred up. But we got that today.
Check out the story via this link.
Then we will come back […]

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