That was the headline to the lead story in The National a few days ago. Big news. Well, the whole of it was: “Every home in Abu Dhabi to have its own street address”. What? And all those good times of describing where you live in relation to a major landmark … could be gone […]

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Don’t you love google translate? It will tackle that mass of copy in some exotic language and render it into English. Well, sorta. Late last night, one of our reporters spotted an item on the English-language homepage of the Dubai soccer club Al Wasl, in which it was reported that the team had fired their […]

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When I heard the news, it was one of those “oh, my” moments. A captain running his boat on to a shoal and having to abandon it. Oh, my. In this case, it was the Team Abu Dhabi boat in the Sailing Arabia competition. In the darkness of Wednesday night/Thursday morning the boat apparently hit […]

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This is not a country that stints on awards and rewards. And now, merely for attending an Al Jazira soccer match, and showing some basic ability at kicking a ball, someone will win a Ferrari Italia 458 … and someone else will win a million dirhams — or $272,000. In cash. Jazira is one of […]

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No Emirati soccer player ever has played in Europe. Not one guy, unless you count Hamdan Al Kamali’s half-season with Lyon’s reserve squad, and no one does. This lack of an Emirati presence in Europe is a topic that comes up often. Fans here are keenly aware that Ali Al Habsi, from neighboring Oman, is […]

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This is a topic that comes up fairly often, in this part of the planet, sometimes referred to as the Mena (Middle East/North Africa) region: Who is the Arab world’s greatest footballer? At the moment, a case often is made, by pundits, for an Egyptian striker named Mohamed Aboutrika, who today made his debut in […]

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I knew I was overlooking something in the previous post — the one about concepts/events that do not occur in Abu Dhabi. And that one was … birds.

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The latest news of match fixing in soccer washed around the globe today, and it was the usual depressing stuff about this game and that game and about 680 other games played from 2008 through 2011 that were deemed “suspicious” by the authorities and may have been fixed, by gamblers. And then there was the […]

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So, you live in Abu Dhabi and want to see the Super Bowl? Have to be prepared to go all night long. With a couple of Americans new to town living just one floor away, at the new digs, we invited them over and watched the game (or I did, anyway) — which ran from […]

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I generally have loathed the San Francisco Giants, but I have rarely felt the same way about the San Francisco 49ers. It probably has to do with the 49ers generally being bad when I was young and a fan of the Los Angeles Rams. The Niners did me no harm. If I think about it […]

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