Another strange story. The world’s most popular and financially successful cricket competition, the Indian Premier League, will play the first two weeks of its season in the UAE. (A story The National’s Osman Samiuddin was all over today.) How weird is that? Imagine the NFL playings its first month of games in Canada. That’s how […]

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I have seen this too many times now to dismiss it as isolated incidents. Remember the New York Cosmos? The soccer team from the old North American Soccer League? Pele played for them. Franz Beckenbauer did. Giorgio Chinaglia. They were a thing for a few years, in an era when North America wasn’t actually ready […]

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No, I did not have a seizure while my right index finger was poised over the “7” key. That is the cell-phone number auctioned by a UAE telecom … that went for $2.14 million. Or, to be specific, in UAE currency: 7,877,777 dirhams. An interesting thing about this?

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The biggest, fastest, most expensive … that’s Dubai. It is a way of life there, at the metropolis an hour up the road from Abu Dhabi. A mindset. And the latest? The fastest police boat in the Gulf!

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I saw Demetrius Walker play three or four times when he was a freshman and/or a sophomore at Fontana High School, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. I remember thinking “he’s OK, but not great”. He was good around the basket, he could leap, but he was only 6-foot-3 (later reduced to 6-2, in […]

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This struck me today. At the morning news meeting, as I looked around the crowded round table: The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi has to be one of the most diverse print media outlets in the world. Let’s enumerate.

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Perhaps we are jaded, here in the 21st century. We have high expectations of everyone and everything, particularly when it comes to our entertainment. Quick and effective is required. Red Bull Air Races at the Abu Dhabi Corniche? Planes racing? That must be fantastic to watch! Uh, no.

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Some of us are getting old waiting for Roger Federer to live up to our declarations of his imminent tennis demise. The man will be 33 in August, which (historically) has been too old to accomplish much, in tennis. And since the days of his absolute domination of the men’s game in the middle of […]

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If you saw the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, you may remember the character played by Andie McDowell and her concern about “the garbage” … and where it all is going to go. How will it be handled? How will it be disposed? (The actual quote, per IMDB.com, is: “Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about […]

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Two weeks ago, the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, women’s version, looked like what the Brits would call “a damp squib”. A dud, that is. (A squib being a firecracker. Yes, they have a different word for everything.) The tournament was hanging its hat on Agnieszka Radwanska, the world No. 3, but not exactly a […]

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