Greek is a tough language. Different alphabet, not spoken by many people, with no living linguistic relatives, impossible to read for anyone who speaks a Western European language. So far, I can speak one word of Greek, and it is in the headline, above. “Yassas” … which is an informal “hello” but apparently can also […]

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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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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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India is home to more than 1.2 billion people. You would think that 11 of them would be decent soccer players. You would be wrong. I was reminded of this today when the Asian Football Confederation did its draw for the first round of 2018 World Cup qualifying. And India, with its 1.2 billion people, […]

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Many soccer countries have a distinctive sound. Their own chants and cheers. Their own national anthem, too, of course. And we have some of both, thanks to The National’s correspondent at the AFC Asian Cup, in Australia, Ali Khaled, who got two bits of video before kickoff at the UAE’s semifinal match with Australia. First, […]

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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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I love the Asian Cup. Such a big continent. So many cultures. So many stories. Like this one: About how Iranian soccer players have been told not to allow female fans to take “selfies” with them in Australia — or face the consequences.

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