No industry is safe from the realities of layoffs. Not even wizarding.
After more than two decades as the official wizard of Christchurch, Ian Brackenbury Channell, 88, saw his $10,000 annual contract go poof last week, according to Stuff, a news site in New Zealand.
No longer will the city payroll support “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services,” as his contract had demanded since 1998. No longer will taxpayers pay for his rain dances, philosophizing and — perhaps more tangibly — his magnetism to tourists.
“They are a bunch of bureaucrats who have no imagination,” Mr. Channell, known most