Saturday, October 01, 2005

Gemini rising

I turned to the back page of the Good Weekend magazine to check the quiz answers and was horrified to see an astrology column had replaced Mark Dapin's droll satire piece.

My first reaction was to condemn the Good Weekend for lowering its fairly rigorous journalistic standards. But something made me read the StarLite column anyway. Perhaps it was the byline: Ptolemy II. (Makes a change from "Athena Starwoman", "Emily Leo" and "Lilith".) So here are my stars for this week:

Be realistic about your attractiveness to the opposite sex. A handy rule of thumb: if you haven't had sex for a month, relax and enjoy the break; for a year, you're either not trying very hard or trying too hard. If you've been celibate for two years or more, time to go online.


By the time I got to Scorpio -- "Dress warmly when outdoors or that annoying sniffle of yours could disintegrate into full-blown pneumonia" -- and Aquarius -- "Your lucky book recommendation this week is Ulysses by James Joyce. Why lucky? I have no idea. I'm just a conduit here." -- I was hooked.

My very favourite entry was for Leo: "Sorry I can't be more specific, but a massive flurry of comet dust is obscuring your vital signs."

I wonder if this will be a regular column? I can't wait to see what the stars have in store for us all next Saturday. And I was so pleased to see that the Good Weekend can safely remain part of my favourite Saturday reading, from Dr Karl's mythconceptions to the inspiration for tonight's dinner menu (mmm: prawn, celery and white bean salad). Who knows, maybe Ptolemy is Mark Dapin's middle name.

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