YOUR STARS

Your stars for this month
Trust me, I’m an expert!*

Note: Due to an unexpected ice fog over much of the Northern Hemisphere, the influence of Venus is somewhat diminished at this time. A severe solar flare is responsible for the fact that star signs for those in the Knysna/Wilderness region should at this time be read in the inverse (e.g. "You will have a good day today" should now read as "You will have the worst day you've had all year").

VIRGO
AUG 24 - SEPT 22

If you go near horses this month, you will upset them and they will attempt to bite or kick you. You are under the impression that your jokes are amusing. In fact, you are boring everybody. Quit your job at once and begin preparing for an unassisted solo voyage across the Pacific Ocean. You will meet a person who will tell you the secret formula for eternal life, if you say to them these words:
"The weather in Chile is a rare topic of conversation." You will step on the last existing member of a 1mm-high humanoid race, without them ever having being discovered by science.


LIBRA
SEPT 23 - OCT 23

Baked beans, alarm clocks and green clothes are to be avoided at this point.You will miss out on dying in a four car pile-up on the weekend, due to deciding to stop and see if the latest issue of your favourite magazine is on the stands (it won't be; you will be disappointed, without realizing that your life has in fact just been saved). Something in your car will break...one of the little plastic-y bits that has no actual name. Mind your head when you pick it up off the floor, or you'll bang the steering wheel.
You will be unable to stop humming Pink Floyd's "Shine on you crazy diamond" for seven days.

SCORPIO
OCT 24 - NOV 22

You will astral travel by mistake, after a dodgy Calamari and Courgette dinner, and find yourself in Barcelona. No one will be able to help you due to your invisibility. You will be sucked into a Boeing 747 jet engine and blown through the atmosphere as ghost particles until (most of) you drifts to earth one mile from your home. What luck. By this stage, your body will have been declared 'dead through natural causes" and handed over for organ donation. Oh well. You will wander the earth as a ghost for seven years until you find a spirit-compatible grasshopper, and become it.
You will then be sucked into a lawnmower.

SAGITTARIUS
NOV 23 - DEC 21

You will develop an irrational fear of National Geographic magazine. Two years of intensive counseling, and tentative encounters with "mock" National Geographics made out of cardboard will slowly cure you of your neurosis. On the day of your last therapy session, you will walk out of the counselor’s office, and be crushed by a falling tower of 500 back issues of Life magazine, which an old lady had been collecting on her balcony three floors up. Such a waste, to have lived in fear of the wrong magazine all that time.












CAPRICORN
DEC 22 - JAN 19

If you touch anything of the colour blue, you will fall prey to either tick bite fever or an unshakeable belief that you are the next American president (50/50 potential outcome). For one week, speak only in words beginning with "r" or "a". In the following week, make all decisions with the roll of a pair of dice (e.g. even number, I become vegetarian, odd number I draw my life savings and book a holiday to Mexico). While you are driving along the freeway one night, a UFO will hover three miles above your car, debate whether to abduct you or not, and then instead abduct a used car salesman from Reading, Berkshire, England. His family will sell their house and buy a yacht to sail the world, only to sink with all hands lost off Belize in 2011.


AQUARIUS
JAN 20 - FEB 18

The next time you get up, the risk of stubbing your toe will be 87%.
You will lose three socks in the laundry, but remain unaware of this fact. These socks will have been sucked into a one-foot wide black hole behind the fridge, which is how all lost socks disappear in the wash. The FBI currently has you under surveillance, suspecting you to be an exotic animals peddler. They do not realize that your flat mate is in fact not a Bhutan striped orangutan, but rather a scruffy Nirvana obsessive who refuses to believe the 90's were rubbish. If you smile, the world will smile with you.











PISCES
FEB 19 - MAR 20

Take the star sign for Scorpio and read it backwards from last word to first. This is your reading, however, also be aware that you will have the ability to fly for exactly seven minutes, so make sure you do so when the time arrives, because this will never happen to you again.

ARIES
MARCH 21 - APRIL 20

The force is strong within this one. Due to the influence of Mars and the fact that you quit smoking recently, you pick fights with every second person you meet. This causes an insurance assessor you phone to resign her job and become an international animal rights campaigner. When you are 72 you decide to trek through the mountains of Vietnam, where you discover this woman living with a pack of gibbons, which she has taught to be telephone insurance assessors. They all work for a telecomm concern from Arizona,
via satellite hook-up. You step into a time portal on the way down into Cambodia, and wind up in the middle ages, where you killed by a Spaniard's arrow.

TAURUS
APRIL 21 - MAY 20

For one month you will be living one minute in the future. This means that you will know everything that is about to happen and will therefore irritate people who talk to you, save a brown dog from being run over, and manage to break up with your partner moments before they dump you.
The coin you swallowed at age six will jam an artery in your leg, necessitating emergency surgery. You will fall in love with the night nurse on duty, who will confess that they stole millions through stock investment fraud in the 80's, and turn themselves in for ten years' imprisonment.
You may or may not wait for them.

GEMINI
MAY 21 - JUNE 21

The third largest diamond in the world is buried in your back yard.
However, due to that mole problem you've been meaning to see to for weeks, the diamond falls through several feet of loosened soil, and will only be discovered in the year 2891, by which time the world economy will have collapsed, thus rendering the diamond worthless. You will grow three centimeters taller overnight, which then subconsciously makes the hottie in your office fancy you that little bit more.
You will embark on a lunchtime liaison in the stocks rooms, be discovered, and summarily dismissed.


CANCER
JUNE 22 - JULY 22

If you enter the national lottery exactly two hours after the next time your dog barks at a passing car, your chances of winning will increase by a factor of 20. An airline stewardess on Iberian Airlines will have a long complicated dream in which you feature, and for the next ten years wonder how she can have a dream about somebody she's never meet. You will meet, when you travel to Austria in 2008, however your hair will be completely different, you'll be suffering from flu, and as a result she won't recognize you. Your dancing ability is much approved in this phase; make use of it.



LEO
JULY 23 - AUG 23

You will rescue a lost, injured homing pigeon in the former employ of the SADF. However, it will be eaten by a neighbor’s cat, which means the message about that small African country with plans to invade Australia will never arrive in London. As a result, world history will change irrevocably.
A butterfly will flap its wings in Argentina; ultimately setting in motion a hurricane that will destroy your new garden gnome retail store in two years' time. It is suggested you develop your unused talent for the cello, so that you can survive as a busker once this happens. You will lose the ability to blink for six days; eye drops are recommended.



* Never said it. Always read the small print! And don’t believe anyone ever.

My Latest Book Review: THE ROAD

THE ROAD

by Cormac McCarthy




A retching, sickly man and his fearful young son walk an empty freeway from a horrific past to an unknowable future. Burnt out cars, skeletal trees and the smoke-enshrouded ruins of cities form their scenery. This is the underworld brought to life and father and son have become "each the other's world entire."

For those unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy’s sparse style, archaic phrasing (he revives words long dead and buried, like ‘roofingtin’; ‘illcarved’) and wild America landscapes, The Road might prove frustratingly inconclusive – you can’t classify it. It’s not a sci-fi, although it is a future-set tale of survival – two refugees following a road through a post-apocalyptic hell.
We aren’t told how things came to be this way; only that one night there was a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” That’s as much as you’re going to get by way of explanation. Plot is less important; the characters’ reactions to their circumstances are what matter. In fact, the vagueness of it all is what unsettles the reader as much as the characters.
As father and son make their way, for no apparent reason, to the coast, they must scrounge for every morsel and fight off characters more desperate than themselves.

This theme of characters often as lost as the reader might feel, began in 1985 with Blood Meridian, a violent retelling of the Davy Crockett legend; it continued in the nightmarish The Orchard Keeper, then traveled on into McCarthy’s breakthrough Border Trilogy – which led to a film version of All The Pretty Horses. After that, this underground author gained notoriety and his next release, In the Country of Old Men, was snapped up for movie rights before it hit the shelves. A more accessible thriller of sorts, it disappointed some who had followed McCarthy’s slow, non-conformist journey from cult author to Oprah guest. In The Road he reverts to form, with the power to communicate in one sparse sentence what lesser writers take pages to do.

The Road has a sense of timelessness – mythological, almost – grounded firmly in the landscapes his characters traverse. In a story that might as easily have been set in the Dark Ages, events unfold with a directness and honesty that moves - without relying on sentimentality.

McCarthy still remains, and covets, the loner character – a figure so isolated in his fictional world that only the reader is looking out for him. In The Road, it is this empathic force that could leave you with a lump in your throat and most surprisingly, given the bleakness of the story as a whole – a sense of hope for humanity.