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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Omar Abdulrahman is the best soccer player in the UAE. He might be the best soccer player in the Middle East. He is good enough that whenever foreigners see him play, they inevitably ask: “When are you going to Europe?” Now and then, Omar has seemed vaguely interested in that concept. He trained for a […]

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Seems like an act of hubris to put up a 79-story skyscraper in Dubai and name it The Marina Torch. Isn’t that sort of asking for fate to intervene? Had the builders never seen (or heard of) The Towering Inferno? So, The Marina Torch, often known simply as the The Torch, got some global notoriety […]

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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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We are very interested in crocodiles, over here in the UAE. They’re big, they’re ugly, they’re dangerous and they’re here. They do not occur in nature anywhere around the Gulf, far as I know, but that has not stopped the operators of Dubai Mall from bringing over a pair, dubbed King Croc and Queen Croc, […]

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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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Fifty Shades of Grey, a bad book and now a bad movie, will not be coming to the UAE. Not unless the movie’s distributors make 35 minutes of cuts from its 125 minutes of running time. The movie is not banned from the UAE. UAE authorities are happy to have it appear here — as […]

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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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We edit and write in British English, here at The National, in Abu Dhabi. Which can be tricky. And sometimes annoying. But the newspaper made one decision back before the launch, in April of 2008, that is brilliant. No diacritical marks. Ever. Expedient? You bet. Sensible? Absolutely. Hence, none of this in our pages:

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Someone came up with that years ago, perhaps George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright. “England and America are two countries separated by the same language,” he is reputed to have said. And working in “British-English” newsroom, at The National in Abu Dhabi, I can vouch for this. We are all speaking the same language, except […]

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