March 4, 2004
As happens from time to time with my heathen friends, the subject of astrology came up. Most of what I know about it is limited to the cheesy horoscopes in the newspaper, but I learned some things.
1) Your major sign (the "sun sign", the one in the papers) is the sign the sun was in front of the moment you were born. These tend to change around sunrise, which is why newspapers disagree on which signs begin when -- is 10/23 Libra because it's Libra at midnight, or Scorpio because that covers more of the day? Anyway, it turns out I'm a Scorpio.
2) The sign that's rising on the eastern horizon at your time of birth is called the ascendant, or rising, sign. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to give the astrologers an out when you do something that doesn't align with what your sun sign says about you. Anyway, by digging up when sunrise happed relative to my time of birth (thanks USNO) I found out that my rising sign is also Scorpio.
3) As yet another out, the sign the moon is in at the time of birth is also a biggie. Your moon sign supposedly tells about the inner you, the part of yourself that you don't share with others. There are a couple calculators on the Web to help you with that one, and it turns out that I'm a Scorpio yet again.
So, whatever Scorpios are supposed to be like, I guess I'm supposed to be that to the nth degree. I would have to assume that this means Scorpios have a nasty tendency to talk out of their asses and that they like arguing. This would also imply that Scorpios don't have many friends.
Of course, the horoscope in the paper is still friggin' retarded.
