As I look at the pictures and videos of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who died today at the age of 80, I’m reminded that Cancer men find it hard not to cry on memorable occasions.
Steinbrenner was born July 4, 1930, sharing a birthday with the U.S.
Another Cancer crybaby is George W. Bush, born July 6, 1946. He was known to fight back the tears.
I’ve blogged about Cancer media tycoon at Astrology Mundo before, but I have to give the Greek transplant a shout-out for her brilliant piece on the U.S. credit card industry in her blog aggregator Huffington Post.
Where has the financial press been on this issue?
As most folks know, Huffington was a big Obama supporter and she fails to point the finger at Vice-President Joseph Biden in her otherwise excellent piece. Biden was one of the architects of the bankruptcy reform law and a recipient of campaign contributions from MBNA, the big credit-card issuer now owned by Bank of America.
Incidentally, Michael WolfStar’s got an interesting piece up on BofA over at Star IQ.
Just as Astrology Mundo predicted, the Los Angeles Dodgers won their game at home today against the Philadelphia Phillies. For Cancer Joe Torre, who manages the Dodgers, there’s no place like home.
According to the Associated Press, the attendance at the game, 56,800, was the largest in Dodger Stadium history and is 800 higher than listed capacity. A special guest was Tiger Woods, who sat in owner Frank McCourt’s box, wearing a Dodgers cap.
The Dodgers face another home game against the Phils on Monday. Boy, I bet the Steinbrenners are really kicking themselves.
Liberals in the U.S. are astounded at how the Sarah Palin Express has roared out of the station. It’s all Sarah all the time, from this blog to Saturday Night Live, where Tina Fey came back on Sept. 13 and impersonated the Republican vice-presidential nominee to great acclaim.
With her triple Aquarius conjunction in Sun/Mars/Saturn on the U.S. Moon, Sarah Palin is emerging as the SuperMom of her country. Why? Because she and her family mirror the concerns of working-class Americans who are clamoring for recognition with Saturn in Virgo.
The Palins are like many American families, struggling to balance work and home life and not always succeeding. We relate to their troubles. The more dirt that the media unearths about the Palins, the more sympathy they generate for the clan. Who among us would want reporters and bloggers putting our lives under the microscope and exposing all of our petty — and not so petty — crimes?
Why do we want someone like us in the White House, or in Palin’s case, a heartbeat away from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? Because we’re a Cancer country and we want to be mirrored. For those who don’t know the psychological jargon, mirroring is something babies want from their mothers.
It’s something we often do unconsciously, which has a lot do with the Moon, the ruler of Cancer. Do you ever notice that you’re crossing your leg or holding your hand in the same position as the person who’s talking to you? You’re mirroring that person.
Remember how George W. Bush was able to persuade Wal-Mart shoppers and Nascar fans that he was just like them by dropping his g’s and coming up with cute nicknames for everybody, even though he is a member of a political dynasty? With his Cancer Sun, mirroring America came naturally to Dubya.
We want someone who looks and acts like us because we’re still infants in our psychological development as a country, a topic I’ve posted about in the past.
That’s why Americans are famous for traveling to exotic places and then complaining how things aren’t the way they are at home. Unfortunately, thanks to globalization and American imperialism, things are increasingly the same overseas as they are here, but that’s another post.
Let’s put aside the fact that GOP Presidential nominee John McCain, a war hero who survived torture and imprisonment (most of us could not do that), is married to a millionaire who is clearly not one of us. I know his name is first on the ticket, but that’s not who’s got everybody worked up into a frenzy.
Unlike the Bushes, the Palins don’t have to pretend to be one of us. As astrological bloggers such as AstroBarry have pointed out, the Palin story has something for everyone.
First, we have Sarah, the hockey mom and PTA activist who became a small-town mayor and then the governor of Alaska. Like a good Mom, she doled out goodies to the kids — $1,500 checks to Alaska residents, their windfall from the skyrocketing profits that oil companies have made in the resource-rich 49th state.
Sarah’s married to high-school sweetheart Todd, known as the “First Dude.” He’s a commercial fisherman and oil industry worker that the vice-presidential nominee calls “my guy.” Sarah may be known as “Sarah Barracuda” from her years as a high school basketball star, but Todd Palin is a champion snowmobile racer with no shortage of good looks and testosterone. He’s also part Eskimo, so the Palins have the ethnic thing covered.
Sarah’s tough, but Todd wears the insulated pants in the family.
Their son Track Palin, 18, is being hailed as a hero after deploying to Iraq on Sept. 11, but browse the blogs and you’ll find allegations that he vandalized school buses. He was underage when the incident allegedly happened so his name was not revealed in the press, but one of his partners in crime has pointed the finger at him. Now, media sources are disputing these rumors, as commenter Sasha points out below.
Track Palin’s sudden deployment reminds me of the Bruce Springsteen ditty, Born in the USA: “Got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in my hand”
On to the rest of the Palin kids. We all know that 17-year-old Bristol Palin is five months pregnant and her parents are promising she’ll marry the father of the baby, Levi Johnston, whom the press has dubbed Bristol’s “Baby Daddy.”
Rounding out the family are daughters Willow, 14, and Piper, 7, who have been taking turns babysitting their new baby brother Trig, who was born in April with Down syndrome, while Mom hits the campaign trail. Even though she knew in advance that Trig had an extra 21st chromosome (the cause of Down syndrome), abortion was not an option for Palin, who doesn’t believe in it except for when the mother’s life is in danger.
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I think some former Hillary supporters who are pro-choice and pro-gay are secretly planning to vote for McCain because of Sarah. Don’t underestimate her appeal among working moms who feel they don’t get their due. They may not agree with all of Sarah’s actions (many of which appear to be clothed in half-truths), but they want her to win. She’s one of them.
A lot of Wal-Mart Moms liked Hillary, especially at the end of the campaign when she found her groove and settled into the persona that Maureen Dowd of The New York Times dubbed the “Scranton gal.” And those Wal-Mart Moms aren’t going to vote for Obama because they don’t like the way he treated their gal.
Hillary’s desire to be all things to all voters ended up confusing them. If she had started with the Scranton gal script and stuck to it, she would have been better off, as Dowd has pointed out.
As much as Hillary genuinely cares about the welfare of American families and has spent her life working on behalf of children, voters couldn’t identify with her. They didn’t really know who she is, an issue that’s also dogging Barack Obama. We saw Hillary eating corn dogs at the county fair, but we knew she’d never opened a can of Dinty Moore’s beef stew for dinner. Sarah Palin might.
Did Hillary cook for her Bill and Chelsea? I suppose she did, though the media reported that Bill Clinton, pre-heart attack, subsisted on a diet of Big Macs and late-night pizza, the way many of us do.
It was interesting how aristocratic white male Southerners hated Bill’s humble roots. They couldn’t believe that a “Bubba” got elected President. But that persona struck such a chord with the electorate that Bush had to pretend to be a Bubba himself.
Here’s how we can resolve our fascination with the Palin clan: Someone should make a reality TV series about them, akin to American Family, the PBS documentary about the Louds that aired in the early 1970s. Maybe one of the Palins will come out of the closet the way that Lance Loud did on TV. Then the Palins really would have something for everyone. (Sadly, Lance Loud died of AIDS-related complications in 2001.)
If I’m dating myself with this Seventies nostalgia, then the Palins could be the subject of a reality TV show like the one about Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their dysfunctional kids.
My mind runs wild about the twists and turns that their lives could take: Track brings an Iraqi bride home to Alaska (in the reality TV show, they have to stay in Alaska), while Willow discovers oil in the backyard in Wassila. It turns out that “Baby Daddy” isn’t the father of Bristol’s child, it’s really his best friend. The possibilities are endless in this real-life soap opera.
Wouldn’t it be great to see how the story turns out for this energetic and attractive bunch without being subjected to their conservative agenda?
Michael WolfStar at StarIQ joins the party by analyzing the political astrology coverage at Huffington Post. HuffPo is the online news aggregator run by liberal political pundit Arianna Huffington, a Cancer who has enthusiastically embraced her adopted country. Don’t miss his great post.
Astrology Mundo had a post on this last month, after my faithful tipster Gastriques first alerted me to the celestial election coverage on Aug. 7.
WolfStar and I don’t agree on the exact date that HuffPollstrology first appeared (I say Jan. 24; he says Jan. 27), but what else is new? He’s probably right, though you know how the Web is: One person makes a mistake and then everybody else picks it up.
What would I do without Gastriques? I pray I don’t lose her to another astrology blog. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, you know, and no one is better than finding man-bites-dog stories than Gastriques.
I took a little drive today to pick up our cat and I heard the deejay on the radio say, “Maybe there’s something to this numerology business, because the Olympics started at 8:08 p.m. on 8-8-08, and now Michael Phelps has won eight gold medals.”
An interesting thought. I was going to rush home and work up an analysis on the U.S. swimmer who is being hailed as “the greatest Olympian of all time,” but Claire Courts at AstroRevolution has beaten me to the punch.
Claire is French so perhaps she can have an unbiased view of Phelps, who is a Cancer, the same sign as the U.S. Cancer rules the mother and an AP story I was just reading said that the Olympian’s relationship with his father is strained, but that many women, including his mom, have cheered him on over the years.
You can read Claire’s analysis here.
You’ve got to love astrology. We’ve got the North Node (mass events), Neptune (alcohol, water, oil), and Chiron (the Wounded Leader, oops, Healer) all traveling together in Aquarius.
With this celestial lineup, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing pictures of a red-faced President George W. Bush apparently so inebriated that he requires assistance to sit down during the swimming competition at the Beijing Olympics.
Where’s the Chirotic wound? Check out the scabs on his elbow. Gastriques, as always, is on the case.
Whether Bush is drunk or not doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that photos are being transmitted by the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services around the world of the U.S. President looking very un-Presidential.
Hey, W., this isn’t a Deke party and you’re not a private citizen. Show a little respect for the good ole USA. You’re embarrassing us — and your family — with your sophomoric antics at the Olympics.
Perhaps it was a good thing that our Cancer Sun President used to stay close to home before he got to the White House. Someone needs to get him back to the ranch in Crawford, Tex. — or to rehab, if needed — pretty darn fast.
Interestingly, Bush himself has a broad conjunction between Neptune and Chiron that is trine the North Node.
With a Leo rising, the Sun is the ruler of his chart and it’s in the 12th house of self-undoing and deception. Everything that Bush has ever been involved in has been a failure that was bailed out by friends and family. Why should the Presidency be any different?
My friends and I have been dwelling on the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, trying to decide whether we should sell all our belongings on eBay in anticipation of the event. Evidently, the folks — be they human or extraterrestrial — behind England’s famed crop circles are thinking about the Mayan calendar too.
Astrologer Michael WolfStar features an item on the crop circles in his column this week at StarIQ: http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0008858.HTM,
A more extensive treatment with fabulous pictures is up at Wolfstar’s Neptune Cafe: http://www.neptunecafe.com/cropcircles.html
Interesting that the latest crop circles, featuring the planetary lineup for Dec. 21, 2012, appeared near Avebury, in Wiltshire, England, on July 15, during the Sun’s passage through Cancer, which governs food and agriculture, as it was trining Uranus, which rules astrology! Not all previous crop circles have been astro-oriented. Talk about a marriage between heaven and earth.
If you want to delve more deeply into this, check out this BBC interview with crop circle researcher David Kingston: http://www.bbc.co.uk/southampton/features/cropcircles/cropcircles_history.shtml
Another good resource is here: http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2008/aveburymanor/aveburymanor2008a.html
One of the more interesting comments at cropcircleconnector.com about the latest Avebury formation comes from Stephen Paoli, who notes, as others do, that all of the planets save Pluto are in the places where they are expected to be on Dec. 21, 2012.
Paoli says: “Pluto’s orbit may have been altered due to the passing of a large body! Nibiru! it could also explain why its orbit is already so strange (Nibiru has come before).”
Niburu. Well, I can see another long and winding Google search is in my future.
In the meantime, I’ve frittered away a couple of hours reading about the history of crop circles and the various hoaxes over the years. Because many of my friends are professional photographers, I don’t use images without giving credit or (gasp!) payment. Here’s one that appears to be in the public domain that comes from All That Is, the Online University of Truth:
I love astrological symbolism. A little background first. The sign of Cancer rules breasts while Sagittarius has dominion over sports, including the Super Bowl, and media like CBS. A quincunx is the 150-degree aspect that astrologer Eric Francis says has a “wild card” feeling.
So as the Sun in Cancer quincunxes Pluto in Sagittarius, we get the news that a federal appeals court has tossed out the $550,000 fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission on CBS after Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed by a “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl. You gotta love it!
Here’s a link to an AP story: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D922AN0O1.htm
For more on the ramifications of Sun in Cancer quincunx Pluto in Sag, check out Francis at PlanetWaves Daily: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PlanetWavesDaily
It’s good to know that a Cancer country like the U.S. can stomach the fleeting sight of a bare breast on national TV.
My laptop seems to be withstanding temperatures of close to 100 degrees (I know that’s cool compared to the temps our troops are facing in Iraq), but my brain has turned to mush. I’ll also admit to being stunned by the events in the financial markets this week — the run on IndyMac Bank, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being bailed out by the Fed, Google missing its earnings forecasts, and General Motors cutting its dividend in half, to name just a few.
Interesting that a bank with “Indy” in its name failed while the asteroid Indiana is traveling close to Neptune, the planet of dissolution. For more about the asteroid Indiana, please see https://astrologymundo.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/bringing-back-the-glory-days-of-the-indy-500/
Closer to home, several tech-savvy colleagues were let go at my day job, while less accomplished performers get to stay on. The unfairness of it floors me.
Being a Cancer Moon, I respond to unsettling news by getting out my well-thumbed Louisana cookbooks and cooking, heat be damned. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted Cajun deviled eggs, which rely on sweet relish, deviled ham, and mustard instead of mayo, and are topped with a pimiento-stuffed olive and a sprinkling of paprika. The recipe comes from Terry Thompson’s Cajun Creole Cooking.
What I love about cooking is predictability. Sure, there are disasters every now and then, but basically if you follow the directions, you get what is promised in the picture. If only life were so simple!
If you want to get really depressed, read Jim Kunstler’s post on Wile E. Coyote Nation: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
Meanwhile, I’m off to the farmers’ market, another cure for anything that ails me. I’m too scared right now to read Ray Merriman’s weekly post.
Photo by Steve Alexander
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