From: Seer Snook's Compendium of Astrological Wisdom

LIBRA (September 23rd through October 23rd)

Ah Libra! Where would the world be without the likes of you?

Well ... For one, the loss of the month would make us all many, many years older, wouldn't it?

But seriously, Libra, we'd be less that category of men--the equivocators, the self-important busybodies, the moaners-on about every inordinate trespass--that burden our daily existence with, let's face it, so much jumped-up fiddle-faddle. That's time we could've just as easily spent having a smoke and reading the funnies, Libra. Don't think we don't resent you for it.

Of the Four Humours, you draw for the defining traits of your nature mostly on air. There's terrific irony in this, but which is likely as wasted on you as is any other subtlety. It is worth noting though that while you may fancy yourself the measure of all things you are more in the nature of being the measurer of all things. You're a Beaker, Libra, rather than a (clearly Gemininian) Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

Your dimples make it difficult for you to shave and, I'm afraid, this is something that you're just going to have to learn to live with, as your beard is patchy and not worth growing.

Your sign represents balance, but by the way you've been behaving you'd think it was an underscored Omega. You strut about in your fancy jacket, and your tieless shirt undone to that hairless, sculpted chest of yours as though God himself kept you on the payroll as a consultant ... But, if I may say so, Libra, hand-cobbled brogues and boot-cut jeans should never be worn together, even if you somehow manage to pull it off. It's exceptions like you that make the rest of us wonder who the layabout is that's supposed to be enforcing the rule. And real men don't wear perfume either. Any more than they slather down their thick, lustrous hair with expertly applied gobs of fragrant pomade. Are you sure, Libra, that you aren't a homosexual? (--Though, no doubt, you'll use that ambiguity to your advantage, along with all the others, in bedding your requisite two different women for the week ... Oh, the very thought of you makes me retch!)

But can I just remind you, Libra, that your sign governs the excretory functions? Yes. The excretory functions. You're a below-the-belt-ruler, the ether informs me, with a special emphasis on the buttocks ... Now stop it right there with all that beat-missingless talk about how you didn't need me to tell you that you're an ass man! This is real schoolyard ignominy, Libra, and no amount of urbane rejoining will see you out of it! I put it to you, sir, that poo is your provenance, and that you wear those immaculate, navy virgin wool, double-breasted blazers to hide the continental sweat swamps you keep under your arms! Go ahead and prove me wrong, Fontleroy!

Material Promise

Your lucky colours are baby blue and rose pink. Your lucky flowers are the violet, the rose, lily-of-the-valley, and the daisy. Your lucky stones are the moonstone, sapphire, beryl, and lapis lazuli. Your lucky birds are the dove and the swan.

( ... Like I say, Libra: gay!)

The Month in Libra (A Précis Governing All Signs)

A general note on home-divinations ...

It is understood (though perhaps not commonly understood) that astrological science is the cosmological pater familias of all the greatest and most powerful superstitions down the ages. Be it Manichaeism, Jacobinism, or Marxism, the conviction amongst their adherents has always been a variation on the same theme: that a) our universe is composed of roughly equal parts of good and bad, and b) it is only fair that each and every man be made (usually by force--but, of course, by teleologically negligible amounts thereof) to bear a materially equal burden of each.

I note this here because it has too often been my experience--as Chief Procurement Presbyter of the Clairvoyant's Guild, South-Eastern Ontario Branch--to hear of some poor bank clerk or middle-manager lamenting his lack of a basic grounding in astrological principles so's that he might divine precisely the amount of ill-fortune due his more successful friends and colleagues and, equally and oppositely, what is due him. But fear not! The seeds of your enlightenment are as abundant and as available now as ever they were! The secret to determining your inevitable future happiness (given all your present and past sorrow) is, to use the corollary of the transcendental terms of the Zoroaster, a simple matter of economics. Or, more precisely, of redistributive economics.

What can be expected when the sun has entered Libra will bear me out quite handily on this, what with all its tedious, narrow, and anti-intellectual emphasis on so-called equilibrium. To wit:

Expect, when in the Seventh House, that either all of your jokes will be disproportionately well-received, or disproportionately poorly received, depending on the average reception given your average, average joke per Zodiac Cycle (exceptions to this formula, of Purely Good Jokes (PCJ) and Purely Bad Jokes (PBJ), are inevitable--but given that they are themselves products of anomalous astrological disturbances that have nothing whatsoever to do with the vehicle of their terrestrial delivery, they are not considered statistically significant). So if you had a year of middling jokes that for some inexplicable reason managed to find favour with your average audience, then expect a month of icy silences, exasperated sighs, and outright offense at even the better material you use. Likewise but in reverse: if your jokes generally fall flat on their apparently flat-footed faces; expect staggered looks and back-slapping, invitations for after-work drinks, and sexual tension with the women of your office or social set who tend normally never to acknowledge your existence past a regretful sneer indicating that they notice you along with all the other blobs of gum on the pavement.

Seer Snook's advice? To the latter category: you can do no wrong! Honestly, none! So enjoy it while you can! You'll want a nice memory or two to see you through to next Fall. To the former category: best that you feign losing your voice for the month, or perhaps that you make-up a terminal relative or friend to explain your uncharacteristic quiet.

... 'Til Scorpio, then, Seer Snook bids you all farewell, and serenity through the impenetrable-to-all-but-him opacity of the existential Abyss!