I was a big fan of Maury Wills, when he played for the Dodgers in the 1960s. These were the struggle-to-score Dodgers, who often went back to Dead Ball Era tactics to win, with “Little Maury” leading the way. Bunt single, stolen base, ground ball to the right side, sacrifice fly. That was a Dodgers […]

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The UAE gets sandstorms. We get that. Like Southern California gets Santa Anas. But this one is unusually severe.  As the photo, above, from our balcony showed, the sun has been nearly blotted out and we cannot clearly make out buildings more distant than across the street. And this was at high noon on February […]

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The growth of the UAE’s two big cities continues to intrigue outsiders, particularly those with cameras. Some are more than tourists with camera-phones. This has led to some impressive time-lapse photography of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and now we have a new addition to the canon — an English photographer’s “flow motion” rendering of a […]

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Friday the 13th does not come up much in the UAE. In the U.S., certainly, hardly a Friday the 13th can go by without media taking note. Watch out! Bad things can happen! Snicker-snicker. Just kidding! Not really! Arabs apparently don’t worry much about the number 13 landing on a Friday. Which makes sense, given […]

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A reader sent along this paragraph from a blogger who goes by Left Coast Sports Babe. “Big sports news across the pond in England. BBC calling it maybe the biggest FA Cup shocker ever – Bradford City comes back from 2-0 down to beat Chelsea 4-2. And in the U.S. people are going, “who’s Bradford, […]

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I refuse to pay for advanced TV packages, here in Abu Dhabi. I could say it’s a matter of principle — I will not pay outrageous rates just to see all the Arabian Gulf League soccer — but it’s mostly about two concepts: –Not being able to get ESPN, at any price; –Not being interested […]

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Over the years, it has been noted that the NFL’s Super Bowl is perhaps the last significant reminder, in the United States, anyway, of the ancient counting system created by the Romans about 2,500 years ago. Roman numerals under the value of 20 still pop up, here and there, in modern American usage. In books. […]

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If this is sports, and we are talking about the UAE’s biggest victory, we can be talking only about soccer. And this was a big victory, indeed. UAE a 5-4 winner in a quarterfinal shootout over defending continental champion Japan in the 2015 Asian Cup in Australia. If you are a team in Asia, the […]

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You’re heard the expression “cover-your-eyes awful” or something near to that? I understood the concept. I had never lived it. Until tonight … while watching the movie starring (and written by and directed by) Simon Helberg — Wolowitz, of TV’s successful Big Bang Theory. About halfway through We’ll Never Have Paris, I literally was covering […]

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Rain here produces a reaction rather like snow does in Southern California. “Oh, cool! Come over and look at this! Wow! … Hey, wait. … This is not comfortable to be walking around in. I don’t have the right clothes. And it might even be dangerous to drive in …” It rained real rain today […]

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