ARIES: Victoria of boisdejasmin.com writes about one of the many chemical experiments in history that has proved useful in a manner so far removed from its original intent that it can only be called a happy accident: “The discovery of the first synthetic musks is a by product of research on explosives. In 1888, Albert Baur, in the process of searching for new explosives noticed that the product of reaction of trinitrotoluene (TNT) and tert-butyl halides produced a pleasant odour. Musk Baur became the first synthetic musk, classified under the nitro musks category.” As an Aries, you have all the natural combustibility of unstable elements readily at hand in your personality. Explosions? Sure, there are plenty of new ones to be orchestrated in 2007, and I have no doubt that some of them will be as loud and messy as you could possibly hope for. But this year, you’ll find the most satisfaction from an unlikely by-product. Keep your nostrils open.

TAURUS: The way real astrologers talk, you’d think that Taurus was a stable, dependable sign; practical as salt and boring as an Edith Wharton novel. This, of course, is almost totally untrue. Many of you are nothing short of zealous in your one-track need to adhere to your own bizarro set of principles. Take, for example, Taurean actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Seriously‚Ķ are “dependable” and “stable” the best adjectives you can come up with for a man who refuses to break character, ever, for the duration of an entire eight-month film shoot? I mean, to the point where he fractures his own ribs and refuses treatment for pneumonia and urges crew members to not only verbally abuse, but throw cold water on him? And who then takes long sabbaticals from acting in order to pursue his passions for woodworking and becoming a cobbler’s apprentice? My feeling is that most, if not all Taureans are closeted DDL’s, waiting for the right opportunity to make the rest of the world bow and scrape at the altar of your secret, singular freakiness. Who knows? Maybe 2007 will be your year.

GEMINI: Komodo dragons are giant monitor lizards whose natural habitat is confined to several islands near Indonesia. Recently, it has come to light that a female Komodo dragon in captivity at the London Zoo has laid eggs that hatched into male offspring, despite the female’s complete isolation from any and all male Komodo dragons. This phenomenon is known in the scientific world as “parthenogenesis,” or a virgin birth. There are all kinds of explanations for how this is theoretically possible, but what this discovery boils down to is that at least one Komodo dragon can reproduce with itself, and no one is sure how yet. Being a Gemini, the sign of the twins, I suspect you might know a thing or two about parthenogenesis that the rest of us don’t. And I think you should try to pull it off this year, for the sake of evolution.

CANCER: Fellow Cancer Amy Vanderbilt was a woman of impeccable taste, so much so that her “Complete Book of Etiquette,” a leading source on the social graces published in 1952, is still widely available today. Don’t know how to behave when a West Point cadet asks you to his formal? What steps should be taken to eradicate embarrassing male acne? Should you send your Jewish friends a Christmas card? Don’t ask me‚Ķ ask Amy, as couth men and women have been doing for over sixty years now. I mention Amy Vanderbilt to Cancers this month because she seems like something of a typical and lovely example of your essence: graciously interested in helping her fellow man avoid the humiliating social blunder. However, it is noteworthy that Vanderbilt died at the age of sixty-six when she fell from the second-story window of her Manhattan townhouse. This fall was blamed on dizziness from medication taken for high blood pressure, but suicide was certainly a consideration. If there is a lesson in this for Cancers this year, perhaps it is that correctness always has a cost. It’s time to decide whether this cost is something you can afford.

LEO: As a basketball mega-achiever, Leo Wilt Chamberlain should have been a respected hero in his own field, to this day holding most of the single-game and regular-season NBA titles there are to hold. For whatever reason, however, Wilt the Stilt (as he hated to be called) was kind of shit on by opposing teams and his own coaches alike. For years, Chamberlain couldn’t be traded fast enough, often to the trading team’s own detriment. He was viciously and repeatedly fouled in pretty much every game he ever played, often preferring to play through the fouls instead of acknowledging them. He’d get injured and everyone would say he did it on purpose. This kind of treatment was basically par for the extroardinary course of achievement he was on. I think the world’s problem with Wilt Chamberlain was that he was just too good, and it pissed people off. If you find yourself in a similar predicament this year, Leo, I suggest you take the seven-feet-and-one-inch-tall Wilt as your example and rise above it.

VIRGO: According to Wikipedia, “Tetris players may lose a game for the following reasons: They can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, or a specific implementation of the game without very responsive control fails to keep up with itself when the pieces’ downward velocity exceeds the maximum lateral velocity the player can apply to a tetromino. In other words, the possibilities for tetrominoes’ movement are limited to the shape of a triangle in the game arena on faster levels. Some players may consider this situation a design flaw; however, it may be reasoned that this is an inherent challenge for the game. Altering this aspect, such as by assigning numerical placements, would change the dynamics of the game approach.” You’re not going to lose at “Tetris” for the first reason, Virgo, seeing that keeping up with the rapid pace of the coming year is the kind of thing you were born to excel at. The second reason, however, might be something to ponder–when you get a minute.

LIBRA: In 2007, you would do well to emulate one of your own, a man named Marvin Lee Aday. This man, best known to the world at large as Meat Loaf, recently released the third album in the Bat Out of Hell trilogy that he’s been working on since 1977. On this album, there’s an operatic little ditty called “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” popularized by the Lady Miss Celine Dion back in the nineties. I knew there was a reason that song always gave me the ecstatic chills, and the reason is that it was written by Meat’s on-again, off-again “collaborating songwriter” Jim Steinman–specifically (according to Meat Loaf and Friends, anyway) for the purpose of appearing on Bat Out of Hell 3. After Loaf and Steinman had an epic falling-out back in the eighties, the song seems to have fallen into the wrong tragically fluttering Canadian hands, dare I suggest out of‚Ķ spite? Regardless, Meat Loaf did not hesitate to include “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” on Bat Out of Hell 3, where it can be heard in all of its stormy, overblown glory. He doesn’t give a shit that this is basically, at least to the world at large, a Celine Dion song. And neither should you this year, Libra. Take it back. Take it all back.

SCORPIO: Still reeling from the outrageous snub of having your ruling planet, Pluto, re-classified as a mere dwarf planet, Scorpio? I would be, too. The implications of this are huge, especially when you take into consideration that Pluto was the god of the underworld in Roman mythology. It is speculated that the planet Pluto was named after this particular god because of its far proximity from the sun. But we both know that a name is not just a name, especially when it invokes the god of the underworld. If you want to take the recent controversy surrounding Pluto’s status as a legitimate planet as a metaphor, it could be said that human beings fucked with the wrong god last year. This year, Scorpio, you will smite them. Smite them and prosper.

SAGITTARIUS: The time has come for you stop pretending that you haven’t made your mind up yet whether you’re Anakin Skywalker or Darth Vadar. The leeway afforded by an undecided stance is seductive and all, but this year you need to accept the responsibility that comes with the choice we all know you made a long time ago.

CAPRICORN: “It was this red hunting hat with one of those very, very long peaks. It only cost me a buck. The way I wore it, I swung the old peak way around to the back–very corny, I’ll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way.” I don’t know if Holden Caulfield was supposed to be a Capricorn or not, but JD Salinger certainly is one, and I’m only rehashing the nearly exhausted issue of the red hunting hat to make a point anyway. My point, Capricorn, is that if you’re going to do all these things no one else understands, at least take something with you. A totem. A symbol. Something to help us pick you out in the crowds as you usher in 2007 with your usual inscrutable intensity. But don’t do it because I said so. Do it because you look good in it that way.

AQUARIUS: “My father warned me about men and booze‚Ķ but he never said anything about women and cocaine,” said Tallulah Bankhead, the Aquarian actress, talk show hostess, an unrepentant lifelong floozy. “She was so pretty we thought she must be stupid,” one of Bankhead’s friends once famously said of her. While it wasn’t necessarily smart to let a case of gonorrhea go untreated so long that doctors had to perform an emergency five-hour hysterectomy on her in 1933, she more than made up for it upon leaving the hospital, when she told the supervising physician, “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!” It seems to me, Aquarius, that like Tallulah Dahlin’, you’ll be searching for loopholes in all the good advice you’ve received from your elders over the years, the better to walk a fine line between the profane and the fucking hilarious. No apologies this year. The rest of us are going to need the comic relief.

PISCES: If Scorpios took a hit this year when Pluto was reassigned to dwarf planet status, Pisceans everywhere are also feeling the burn. One of your own, an astronomer by the name of Percival Lowell, is attributed with doing most of the preliminary work that led to Pluto’s discovery, fourteen years after his death in 1916. While Lovell was principally interested in the presence of canals on Mars, his name endures through its link to the now-maligned dwarf planet. You, much like Lowell, offer your support to 2007’s major themes in a diffuse manner that may not be entirely on purpose or in your own interest. The flipside of this is that your usually precise emotions may also come at you in a diffuse manner, from unexpected angles, and affect you in ways you could not have foreseen. If Scorpio is doing battle in 2007, Pisces is inadvertently pulled from a conscientious objector stance into some sort of melee that at first glance might appear to have nothing to do with them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 8:22 pm.