The rumors had been that Fabio Cannavaro might be one-and-done as a player in the UAE’s Pro League. The man may have been Fifa Player of the Year as recently as 2006, but the little Italian looked pretty much done this year while playing for the Dubai club Al Ahli. He wasn’t awful, exactly. He […]

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Radio is a curious medium. So retro yet so oddly compelling, if you can be troubled to turn off the TV and shut down the laptop and just let the words wash over your brain. My grandmother was a huge fan of the radio. Whenever I visited her home, she would be puttering around in […]

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I am not a big hockey fan. I’ve covered parts of three Stanley Cup finals, the Kings-Canadiens in 1993, the Ducks-Devils in 2003 and Ducks-Senators in 2007, and found the experience interesting enough … but I generally will not make a point of watching a final that does not involve SoCal teams. That changed tonight […]

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No, this is not about the soccer club. When reviewing, a few weeks back, the interesting assumptions Isaac Asimov made in his “Foundation” series — set 30,000 years-plus in the future — I neglected to mention a fairly major assumption that he made. To wit: Humans are the only form of intelligent life in Asimov’s […]

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A hot topic here today, at least among the expat community: Photos of the wife of John Terry, the Chelsea defender and former English captain, frolicking in almost nothing on the beaches of Abu Dhabi! We are never surprised when WAGs (Wives And Girlfriends) go out and about with little or no clothes on. It’s […]

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The day after the end of a season is when, by the laws of print journalism, we are required to do a retrospective. The Pro League season ended Sunday, so for the Tuesday a.m. newspaper we printed our all-star team and a look back at the key factor in Al Jazira winning its first league […]

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It was strange, really. I’ve never seen a championship celebrated before and during a regular-season game. Nor have I seen one conducted in an outdoor stadium where the temperature was more than 100 and kickoff and about 113 in “feels like” degrees. Al Jazira of Abu Dhabi won the two most significant trophies in the […]

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Diego Maradona spent the day in Dubai, just up the road from us in Abu Dhabi, and how can we describe the reaction? How about “over the top”? El Diego, El Jefe Loco, had them eating out of his pudgy hand at a press conference, on Dubai’s Palm Jumeira  — one of the ritziest hotels […]

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We have noticed it here in the Arabian Peninsula, too. Rising food prices. It’s a dirham (27 cents) here and a dirham there. Insidious, in that you remember getting basically the same things at the market for 100 dirhams a few months ago, and now it’s 105. It’s difficult to spot, right off, where the […]

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I wasn’t sure we would get the Champions League final in Abu Dhabi. Seems like we don’t get all that much on TV, sports-wise, without paying lots of dirhams, and we didn’t do that with our TV package. But we did get it, on three Al Jazeera sports stations, and it was fascinating to watch […]

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