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[My employer] laid off about 20% of its workforce today. In the New York office, roughly 100 out of 350 people were let go. My particular corner of the [A client] account has been very slow for several weeks, so I’ve been operating under the assumption that I was going to be let go. I’ve been updating my resume, canceling my Netflix account, even picking out new hobbies.

I was right about one thing — my department couldn’t continue to afford me. However, I got something of a special deal. [CEO NAME], the CEO of [My employer], is an alumnus of Bain & Company, one of the very top-tier consulting firms. He’s involved with a lot of charitable organizations, including the Bridgespan group, an arm of Bain that provides reduced-cost consulting to not-for-profit companies. The deal is that I’ll take a pay cut, then get “donated” to Bridgespan for at least six months. During the six months, I’ll be doing technology consulting for Bridgespan’s not-for-profit clients. At the end of the assignment, I return to my job at [My employer] and full pay.

I’m really psyched — my freelance work makes the offer easy to accept, I don’t lose career momentum, I get to work in not-for-profit again, and I get to work through a Big Five consulting firm, in a group that Bain consultants clamor to join. This is one hell of an alternative to getting laid off.

My paternal grandfather and my dad both were fox hunters; in fact, the Whitford hunt is what brought my grandfather out from Philadelphia on the weekends, and is how he met my grandmother. It’s also how he came across Arrandale, the estate that he persuaded his father to buy and renovate, which is the place where I grew up.

Fox hunting in Chester county always seemed to fit in with my idea of the area. Like Emma Woodhouse’s Highfield, Chester County was home to the gentry, but it was country gentry, — what the Philadelphia Inquirer society column referred to as the “Chester County Smart Set.” (One society page reports Kate’s grandmother accepting a twenty-dollar bet to dive into the swimming quarry fully dressed. She does, “…ribbons flying prettily”, but only collects four dollars.) By the time I was a kid, the salad days had passed; the powerful McIlvaine clan had sold off their large tracts of land, and the Philadelpia industrial corridor had started to reach out past the end of the Main Line.

So I was excited when Kate’s parents invited us to join the Skycastle French Hounds, a rabbit hunt in Chester county conducted on foot with a pack of french basssets (called “fuzzies”, I think.) I’m not sure whether rabbit hunts coexisted with fox hunts, or whether rabbit hunts took over once the land became built up and unsuitable for riding. My dad remembers one long run straight from Downingtown to Paoli: a straight run over unbroken country then, fifteen miles of strip malls and developments now. Anyhow, almost all of the trappings of a fox hunt seem to be present at a rabbit hunt: handlebar mustaches, brass horns, and silver tea sets are all evident in profusion. Just check out the dress code for the hunt staff and “whippers-in”:

• Black hunt cap
  
• Green hunt coat with crimson collar and hunt buttons
  
• White shirt with stock
  
• Canary westcoat with hunt buttons
  
• White trousers with dark green knee socks and leather boots
  
• A lash or thong whip, no longer than a yard and a half.
  

For a fellow hooked on G.A. Henty books and Flashman novels, a fellow whose stated ambition this spring was to find an occasion to wear a pith helmet (which I never did, by the way), a fellow who wore his grandfather’s evening scarlet to high school graduation, this rocks! I’m walking in the steps of my ancestors, especially my maternal great-grandfather Lardner Howell, whom my grandfather once described as a “howling swell.”

Batten down the hatches…?

The rumors are flying thick and fast at [My employer] about another round of layoffs, and it’s hard not to get rattled by it. Which, I guess, is why I’m rattled by it. Even though I’m not in any danger of sleeping on the street, (or even moving back in with parents), even though horrible things have happened in the past month here in New York that make me glad just to be alive, even though I still have a great freelance job on the side, the possibility of getting let go is really scary. I remember learning rock climbing, tied in to a harness, top-roped and belayed by an instructor, barely eight feet off the ground — falling still felt like I was going to die. The last few seconds while I was clinging to the wall was the worst part, actually: the fall itself wasn’t bad at all (except for the wedgie.)

I’m not sure if I hope that will turn out to be an applicable metaphor.

Dear John: Many thanks. Dave Barry.

…the above being the entire text of a hand-written postcard I got from Dave Barry today! Hooray! Dave was writing in response to a postcard I sent him telling him that I thought his novel “Big Trouble” kicked ass (and letting him know what the Ultimate Water Gun has been up to since he borrowed it in 1996.) Yay!

Good Guys Wear Black

(and they do the “bunny hop”)

I studied a lot of Tae Kwon Do in college, and ended up taking a year off to run a local karate school: the “Oriental World Martial Arts Studio” in Richmond, Indiana (“Richmond’s oldest and largest martial arts studio!”) The school was on the first floor of an old dressmaking factory with oak floors and pressed tin ceilings. The deal was that I got to live on the second floor, in a loft fifty feet wide by maybe three hundred feet long. The loft had seen a lot of use as an indoor paintball arena, and my friend Todd Pugsley and I renovated it. We pulled up the carpet, stripped the floor, bought roller skates, and lived the high life. Todd had colossal parties, with stages for bands and boxing rings taped on the floor. I built a bed eight feet wide and twelve feet long, painted red with gilded molding. I parked my Land Cruiser in the alley in such a position that I could jump out the mezzanine window and directly into the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, I planned karate demonstrations at the local mall in which we smashed stacks of cinder blocks. (Also, a ninja would come out and wave his sword at a banana. Then I’d peel it to reveal the fruit sliced into neat pieces. We signed up a lot of kids that way.)

Anyhow, the think I liked about the school was that people took the karate seriously, but they didn’t tend to take themselves seriously. Unlike the “Cobra Kai”-style school down the street, when people walked through the door they stayed people; they didn’t metamorphose into glowering Bushido warriors with secret fantasies about pulling your heart out and showing it to you as it stopped beating. It was a nice, family-style school with good training. In the seven years since I’ve taken karate, I’ve been looking for a school like that. Unfortunately, everything I’ve found in New York has been big on attitude. Plus I wanted to take a Chinese style, because tae kwon do was starting to mess up my knees.

So I was really psyched to discover a Hsing Yi class on Church street in Tribeca, where my friend Steve Farrell teaches. It’s on the second floor of a nondescript building with an unmarked buzzer (add points for secret Kung Fu coolness), above a warehouse where Sabrett hot-dog vendor carts are kept overnight (add additional points for true New York grit.) The people are friendly, and the kung fu is absent of silly macho-ness. Last night, we spent two hours doing “frog jumps”, “duck walks”, and “bunny hops”: exercises I could never see Ralph Macchio’s opponents doing. Of course, they were grueling, and I’m as weak as a kitten today.

Which is a good thing; in the seven years since I was into martial arts, I’ve, er… changed. My black belt no longer wraps twice around my waist, I can’t put my palms on the floor, and frog jumps make me see spots. My ballet days are definitely behind me. However, I’ll confess a secret ambition: I’ve always wanted to be like William Sadler (“Death” in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey), doing kung fu in his hotel room in the beginning of Die Hard II.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Play “Planetfall” right here and now!

Planetfall is one of my very favorite games of all time. It’s an Infocom game, published in 1983. Go on, try it — it’s not addictive, I swear.

By the way, your browser security settings probably won’t permit you to SAVE or RESTORE games. If you get hooked, I’d recommend downloading the game and playing it locally.

Need hints? Go here for an online version of the old invisible-ink “Invisiclues” booklet.

See you in two weeks!

I’m slowly making progress on my book project, The Time Traveler’s Handbook. For those of you that I haven’t told about it one bazillion times already, the book will be the one reference you need to rule the world at any time in the past. Lists of winning lottery numbers, blueprints for industrial breakthroughs, even (of course) lists of dates, places, and times of major solar eclipses. Now I just need to talk my brother Oliver into creating some cool illustrations. My favorite idea so far is a nice period-style oil painting of an eleven-year-old kid Tasering a knight in armor.

Also, of course, I have to embark on a colossal research project. I’ve already found some cool source materials, and have an idea to start interviewing college professors and other interested parties.

Anyhow, registered the domain name timetravelguide.com today, and will have a new site up and running soon.

As you can sometimes see from my webcam, my desktop wallpaper for the past few years has been Pieter Breughel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. In the Metamorphosis, Ovid tells the story of Icarus’ flight and fall in dramatic terms, speculating that

“Some fisher, perhaps, plying his quivering rod, some shepherd leaning on his staff, or a peasant bent over his plow handle caught sight of them [Icarus and his father] as they flew past and stood stock still in astonishment, believing these creatures who could fly through the air must be gods” (Metamorphosis 8).

The fisher, the shepherd, and the peasant are all present in Breughel’s sixteenth-century painting, but they aren’t standing stock still in astonishment. In fact, they don’t even notice the pair of white legs disappearing into the water, the small flurry of skin and feathers in the corner of the painting. This has always been poignant to me; the story unfolding in the painting will be told for thousands of years, and it sure as hell is the most important thing in the world to both Icarus and his father at the moment, but the rest of the world is just going on. Not callously, necessarily, and not with malice; it’s just continuing on oblivious.

W.H. Auden’s poem on the painting has always haunted me, and never more than now. I’m not sure that I can pinpoint why; it’s not that I’m angry that life goes on, and I certainly don’t think that this tragedy hasn’t received enough attention.

Musee des Beaux Arts (1939)

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The Nanobots Are For Your Own Good

I managed to make an appointment to give blood today. Actually, all the blood banks seem to be full-ish, so I made an appointment to give platelets. Platelets are used in the treatment of burn victims and leukemia patients: apparently, it takes six donations’ worth of whole blood to make up one transfusion, but only one platelet donation. So I went into the blood center on 67th and 2nd with my co-worker Steve Farrell and spent two hours with tubes in both arms, hooked up to an apharesis machine.

The apharesis machine takes your blood out of one arm, strips out about 10% of your platelets, then puts it back in the other arm! EEEwwwww! It looks kind of like an elementary-school projector, except instead of film, the machine is threaded with dozens of tubes carrying your personal blood around a maze of spinning knobs. During the course of a donation, it processes about four liters of blood (according to Yahoo, about 70% of my total supply: cool!) Frankly, I couldn’t wait to go through the procedure so that I could write about it here — the whole thing has this kind of B-movie science fiction panache. Maybe they’ll introduce nanobots into the tubing, giving me super powers! Maybe I’ll come out with laser-beam eyeballs, or X-ray vision!

Well, I didn’t gain any freaky cyborg abilities, but I did get to pretend, sort of. I spent the whole time talking on my wireless Bluetooth headset, because both my arms were tied down and festooned with tubes. I even got to be on TV doing it; Reuters came in to shoot some footage on disaster volunteers, and filmed me talking away, green light on my microphone boom flashing, knobs on the steel-and-enamel machine spinning in opposite directions, tubes jerking as the flow reversed periodically. Right on!