Saw the UAE’s final friendly match tonight, ahead of their going to England for the London 2012 Olympics, and wrote about it for The National. The UAE football team reaching the Olympics … a very big deal. Not that anyone with much experience following soccer likes their chances, especially in a group with Uruguay, Great […]

[Read more →]

So, the UAE Olympic team, mostly guys 23 or younger, played a team from Hungary the other night, and crushed them, 5-0. UAE football officials were not pleased that the Hungarians put up so little resistance — though it was 0-0 until the 40th minute. (Less than two weeks ahead of their London 2012 opener, […]

[Read more →]

I covered the UAE Olympic team’s friendly with a group of Hungary kids last night, and the second half was remarkable, to us desert dwellers, for one aspect: It rained throughout. Sometimes it poured. A fact to keep in mind:

[Read more →]

I am in the city of Lienz, Austria. Not Linz, Austria, which is a fairly big town near the German border. This is Lienz, a skiing village of about 10,000 people here in the Tyrol region of the country. Just north of the border with Italy, actually. I am here to do some stories on […]

[Read more →]

Sharjah is the San Bernardino of the UAE. Lots of hard-working people there, but many of them without much money, and if a really goofy story happens in the UAE, it’s a fairly safe bet to suggest: “And it happened in Sharjah, right?” Just as in San Bernardino or, maybe, Vernon or even Compton in […]

[Read more →]

About halfway through Wimbledon, a Yank who sits near me in the offices of The National, a guy who is not a tennis fan, asked: “Why do the women play only best of three?” That is a very good question. Yes. Why. In an era where women run the same distances as men do, and […]

[Read more →]

The National opened for business in April of 2008, and the newspaper had a website from the start. Of course. But in the past year or so, efforts to get readers to the site have intensified, and more people are involved on the web side of things, and page views have gone up dramatically. So, […]

[Read more →]

A vanity among residents of greater Los Angeles is that they breath the world’s worst air. Not even close. It might have been true for a stretch in the 1950s and 1960s, but strict controls on automobile emissions have turned SoCal air from horrible to just bad — and that doesn’t cut it among cities […]

[Read more →]

This is something you notice during the World Cup, too. Especially if you live where the games are shown at night, and become regular viewing. The First Day with No Games.

[Read more →]

This was so awful I actually felt badly for my English colleagues at The National. Well, not quite. But I was edging in that direction on the emotional spectrum. OK, I’d taken a tentative step … and then I just laughed. I believe even American soccer fans have become aware of the train wreck of […]

[Read more →]