The guy who laid me off 3.5 years ago had his own moment with the sharp end of the “consolidation” side of print journalism last week. That is to say, he’s out of newspapers and apparently is unemployed. Here is the typically code-riddled e-mail to the people who worked for him:

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It’s a planet with 7 billion people on it whose agenda is “it’s all about me.” Or, OK, maybe 6.9 billion people living with that myopic world view (many of whom would like to deny it), and maybe 100 million people who are saints or grandmothers or both. So, it was with profound self-focus that […]

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T-Day in the UAE, our second. I can sum this up quickly: It didn’t really happen. Both of us worked on Thursday. Same as last year. Same as the year before, in Hong Kong. (Three consecutive Novembers outside the U.S.)

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That’s what I’m calling it. A slump. Just a string of unfortunate results. Accidents, even. I don’t actually look like that. A little down period on the mugshot front. It began the other day. 2005, I think it was.

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No matter how the midterm elections go, back in the U.S. today, we can’t complain about the outcome. We did not vote. We have explanations … but not excuses.

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Today marks the one-year anniversary of the day in 2009, October 15, a Thursday, when we got on a plane to leave the United States. We have not been back since.

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Rather a lost day. Well, apart from the scenery, which was rolling and green and a constant pleasure to scan. But if the idea was to find a place in Languedoc we could invest in … Have to concede we really didn’t make any progress. I suppose those things happen, when house-hunting. I’ve heard people […]

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I was thinking about the Beijing Olympics, and realized that the U.S. men’s basketball team had zero Clippers on it. But then, neither did the Vancouver Olympics. Have any Clippers on the U.S. team. Though clipper ships presumably sailed to Vancouver, but not Beijing, it being too far from the ocean. Hong Kong? Sure. But […]

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Sometimes it seems a lifetime ago, but there was a long stretch of time when a big chunk of my brain was devoted to a big but fairly specific topic: High school football in San Bernardino County. There was nothing bigger, in that part of the sports world. Everything else was somewhere down the line. […]

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I’m going to do the math. I’ve been out of the United States for … hold on … for 128 days now. My longest consecutive stretch, eclipsing the 120 (or thereabouts) I spent in and around Hong Kong in 2008-09. No, not a significant stretch for veteran expats, or career diplomats or military people based […]

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