Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 29, 2022

By miniseries she meant football season. By hiatus she meant halftime.

Yep, that’s astrology in a nutshell, and I do mean NUT. Anything means whatever you want it to mean.

Due to the precession of the equinoxes, the 12 constellations of the zodiac are now one “house” removed from where they were 2150 years ago, but the predictions based on the location of the sun, moon, and planets within those houses really hasn’t changed much at all.

Also note that the sky looks pretty much the same all night long at any given latitude over the entire world, so children born in New York City (41° N) can easily share the same “destiny” as those born the appropriate number of hours later in Beijing, Istanbul, Rome, or Barcelona — or even that cute baby dolphin in the middle of the Pacific or the sweet little newborn camel on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan.

There’s naïve, there’s NAÏVE, and then there’s Boopsie.

Be sure to tip her well for the great tips, Boopsie!

A former IT colleague later worked for Miss Cleo. His software read the sucker’s caller ID, gave “Cleo” a quick database read, and voila! Psychic. Entrepreneurship is fine, but these MFs are frauds and criminals.

Classic cold reading: You get the pigeon to tell you everything, while convincing them you’re coming up with the information.

“I’m getting a name with an A in it, and maybe an M.”

“My father’s name is Sam.”

“Yes, Sam. And Sam has passed on, or he’s sick, or he knows someone who’s sick.”

“That’s amazing!”

“Madam Triage” Gotta love that name…

“Barbara Ann Boopstein”? Really? I had no idea what her full name was. I feel enlightened, a little.

Some people are so terrified of life that they’ll do anything to get an “inside line”.

I once paid for a Tarot reading from an acquaintance at an outdoor fair. I carefully kept a “poker face” as she tried various “spiels” on me. She finally stopped the reading and lit some incense to change the mood. I took the hint and starting feeding her cues which resulted in a cheerful reading of my prospects.

She told me she worked a lot of business conferences. She once told me, “Can you imagine the kind of trouble these guys are in to come to a Tarot reader for help?”

I knew an astrologist once, but he changed jobs to become a proctologist – a related field! He ended up incarcerated, as he struck a happy medium, she was not so happy after that!

A friend of mine, one of the more intelligent people I’ve known, went to a whateverist, who told her, “I think that sometimes you feel alone, and that sometimes you don’t think you’ve gotten the credit you deserve.” And my friend was impressed with this insight. Make of it what you will.