Prague has seen its share of eras, and seems understandably jaded from so many, particularly when they remake its landscape, society and identity. Fortunately, not all eras are as earth-shattering as, say, post-communism.

We're now entering one you could call, with some license, post-Bohemian-Expatism. Whether or not that's a good thing can be debated. But the fact is, the days of newly graduated Westerners turning up in Prague to start literary movements, "new media" collectives or even just a hip city magazine are waning.

Scott MacMillan leaves Prague on Friday after nearly a decade of life here as a journalist, editor, lawsuit defendant, minor café mogul and bloggist extraordinaire (www.scottymac.blogspot.com). It seems fair to say this event will noticeably lessen the aura of decadence — or at least the appearance of an aura — that made Prague such a magnet for the truly weird and hopefully gifted throughout the '90s.

When this Amherst College grad first turned up in a Zizkov apartment in September 1996 looking for a place to crash and a job, he surprised a lot of people by landing one in very short order at the Prague Business Journal. He also managed to get his good friend Julia, who put him up at said apartment, evicted in short order — but that's another story.

Or maybe it's not. MacMillan's talent for inciting people with precisely the wrong words at precisely the right time is probably what accounted for both events. His knack for provoking folks, whether they were sources for a story or just casual acquaintances, probably turned up as many good stories in print as any expat hack before or since can claim.

One memorable example was a conversation he had with an advertising agent who was fired not long after MacMillan put it into print. The agent, as they are wont to do, was endeavoring to get the PBJ to write something favorable about a client, and suggested to MacMillan one or two journalistically "creative" ways to get this done. It was no doubt the most unfortunate suggestion she ever made, because that's what he wrote about. After she was fired, she filed an unsuccessful libel suit alleging the story about her attempt to influence the press was unduly damaging.

MacMillan's own attempts to influence the press, through his columns on media and advertising, and later through a short-lived monthly called Prague Insider, were ultimately about as successful as the hapless advertising agent's.

Independent publishing is a risky business the world over, and doubly so in Prague. Thus, the hip Insider survived barely four issues before MacMillan decided on the leisurely life of a café baron. Or so he thought. After helping found Café Ebel — which, incredibly, succeeded — he launched the Tulip Café on Opatovická street with a few colleagues. Unlike Ebel, which is still riding the premium coffee boom, Tulip turned out to be a lot of work. And MacMillan's favorite soy burgers (along with jazz sessions sung by this reporter) somehow never quite caught on. He's since sold Tulip to an experienced and affable ex-attorney from California named Ray, and MacMillan now pledges he's finally getting on to a real career out in the real, wide world beyond Prague.