Observations on the Zodiac
My wife and I put out a newspaper once a month called Watson’s World News. Mostly it’s just an advertisement for our school, Watson’s School of English, and it is also a helpful aid for teachers looking for a lesson plan.
We choose the kind of stories which wind up on various “strange news” sites, there are offbeat inventions and crazy lawsuits and celebrity scandals. There is very often a story or two about animals who act more human than humans. I simplify them a bit, and we do translations of some difficult words at the bottom of each story.
Anyway, we also do a monthly horoscope column. In some ways, it’s the easiest column to write, because I just find a site on the internet that has the prognostications and…well, I wouldn’t call it plagiarizing. I think of it as an adaptation. The two most popular sites (in any event, the ones that always come up 1st on google), astrologycafe and Susan Miller’s astrology zone, write more words per sign per month than I put into my daily blog, and what we have in the paper is a one column, 3 or 4 line blurb.
So, if they say “your energy is high this month and the stars are aligned in your favor. You should take advantage of any new business opportunities that come your way,” I say “Make hay while the sun shines” or “strike when the iron is hot” and figure it’s a good excuse for the teacher to teach that phrase.
I’m not a true believer but I do toy with stuff like that. I read Tarot cards, and use the Zodiac shamelessly as a conversation starter. I took an astronomy class once, and was stunned at how vehemently the professor objected to Astrology. The great distance between the stars, the fact that they’ve changed position, stuff like that. He had a point, but the fact that it has nothing to do with the stars doesn’t prove that birth season has nothing to do with personality.
I did the thought experiment with members of my family (I come from a pretty large family) and everybody fit their signs pretty well, with one big exception. My father was far too consistent and calm to be a typical Aries. So, 1 out of 9. Does that prove or disprove the whole thing? I suppose it depends on how strict and literal you want to be.
There’s one interesting thing that I’ve discovered while writing the zodiac column. It’s not so much that each individual sign’s fortunes change from month to month, but there are good months and bad months across the board. For instance, for next month, pretty much every sign said “There will be communications problems after the 18th.”
It’s logical, I suppose. If a Leo is going to have communications problems then every Cancer or Scorpio they deal with is going to have communications problems, too. We do not live our lives in isolation.
So, they phrase it a little bit differently for each sign – as do I – and count on the fact that most people just read their own and ignore everyone else’s.
It’s true, though. You can check it out.
www.gurukalehuru.com 