can't argue with that
xkcd.com
Except that I was actually conceived closer to Thanksgiving; I was born two weeks late, and, as I often say, I haven't caught up yet.

Week of 17 December 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Twenty-two percent of American rightwing fundamentalists believe that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.  On the other hand, 73 percent of the people who read my horoscopes think that if there were such a thing as an Anti-Christ, he would be an American rightwing fundamentalist.  But I’d like to ( Read more... )

Week of 10 December 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Whenever the tide goes out, the creek I live next to loses a lot of its water to the bay.  It becomes a narrow trickle surrounded by stretches of mud.  From a distance the mud looks like a wet black desert, but if you get up close you’ll see it’s covered with tiny furrows, pits, and bulges.  This ( Read more... )

Week of 3 December 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In one of his short poems, John Averill ( twitter.com/wiremesa) describes a scene that I think captures the essence of your current astrological omens: “Today is the day of the photo of moonrise over Havana in a book on a shelf in the snowbound cabin.” Here’s a clue about what it means: The snowbound ( Read more... )

Week of 5 November 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Hey Rob: I was having trouble finishing my novel - typical writer's block.  So I sidetracked myself into making silly creative projects - papier-mâché chickens, masks made out of junk mail, collages incorporating bottle caps and dryer lint.  I can’t say any of it is ‘art,’ but I feel creative ( Read more... )

Week of 29 October 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):“The more beautiful the bird, the poorer the singer,” wrote L. M. Boyd.  “Peacocks scream, macaws screech. Birds of Paradise croak.”  Among the most interesting singers, on the other hand, are birds that are far less spectacular in appearance: the Black-capped Chickadee, the Willow Thrush, and the ( Read more... )

Week of 22 October 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In my dream last night, the High Priestess from the Tarot deck came to life and gave me the following message: “Tell Virgos that when their deep hunger starts to stir, they should not eat from the bowl of delicious seeds.  That meager meal would not satisfy their deep hunger.  Rather, they should ( Read more... )

Week of 15 October 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): To extract enough gold to make a wedding ring, a mining company must process a ton of ore. In a similar way, many writers generate a swamp of unusable sentences on their way to distilling the precise message they really want to deliver. Please keep these examples in mind as you evaluate your own ( Read more... )

Week of 8 October 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): One of the best modern Turkish poets was Seyfettin Bascillar, who worked as a meat inspector in New Jersey for many years before his death in 2002.  Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz lived in Berkeley, California for over four decades while writing his books in Polish, his native tongue.  ( Read more... )

Week of 1 October 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In a puckish fantasy, the poet Linh Dinh imagined a hypothetical scenario in which it would be uncool to be too cool.  “In an effort to inject more pep and resolve into its lethargic citizens,” he waxed with prophetic longing, “the government is mandating the use of an exclamation mark at the end of ( Read more... )