In my time in the UAE, the senior national soccer team has been, mostly, wretched. The Emirati footballers completed a hapless campaign in the final round of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup just after I arrived in Abu Dhabi, in late 2009, but I heard about it, and the reverberations could still be felt. […]

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I find the notion of “2013” awkward. It’s the 13. Not a felicitous number. Though it does sound more like a football score than anything we have had in a while. Which is good. Moreso than 20-10 or 20-09, certainly, or even 20-07. Just looking at it, it seems as if it is a prime […]

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The final match of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship was played today, here in Abu Dhabi, and Novak Djokovic defeated Nicolas Almagro, as everyone expected. The score, however, was much closer than expected, considering the world No. 1 player was taking on No. 11. But Almagro won the first set in a tiebreaker and seemed […]

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In yesterday’s post, I noted how difficult it is, in the Western world, to have good newspapers in the final week of the year. Parliaments are not in session, stock exchanges take days off, sources are out of town, fewer games are scheduled. At newspapers, one of the bits of enterprise often used to fill […]

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Why the British (and many of their former colonies) celebrate Boxing Day … well, it’s just odd. Apparently, they don’t even know themselves. They have guesses, but … Maybe it was one of the earliest successful pushes to extend a holiday — a notion that has led to so many modern three-day weekends in the […]

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One of the newer arrivals here at The National came to this realization while speaking with someone back in the States. “Today is Christmas, or as it is known in Abu Dhabi … Tuesday.” This was said at the office, where a plurality of staffers were working, as they would on any Tuesday during the […]

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So, in the new place. And no longer embarrassed by where we live. (Both of us, that is.) Let’s throw a SoCal Christmas-themed party! And what that requires, first and foremost?

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At the office today, one of our copy editors said: “Guess we don’t have to try very hard today, since the world ends tomorrow.” The world will end someday. Whether through a religious event of when our sun goes supernova. But if we have learned anything from the extraordinary number of predictions of The End […]

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In a previous life as a Southern Californian, I remember being told how bad we all were at driving in the rain. And, collectively, SoCal people probably are bad at it. People living there expect their roads to be dry and grippy … because 340 days a year they are. What then to expect from […]

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Expats arrive in the UAE, and they hear about camel beauty contests, and they assume it must be a joke. To the average human, camels are remarkably homely. A horse? Now there is a sleek animal. But a camel? It may rank with the hyena as the ugliest land animal around. Turns out, camel beauty […]

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