Mystic Mogg

I liked Tim Dunlop's predictions for 2006 so much that I have decided to put on my amateur astrologer's hat, the pointy one with the planets and spiders on it, and see what lies in store for us all star-wise.


ARIES
You people are such children it won't really matter to you what's happening in the wider world. You will be too busy chasing after shiny things, courting applause, and twirling around in your red satin threads trilling 'Look at moy!!' Some people will indeed look at you, but probably not for the reasons you would like.

TAURUS
We Taureans are good with money, so will probably be able to find an up side to this year's combination of rising costs and falling wages. But if deprived for too long of the silk sheets, Veuve Clicquot, handmade Belgian chocolates and individually hand-fried wedges with imported Thai sweet chilli sauce and gourmet sour cream that our souls crave, our legendary rumbling-volcano tempers could erupt into a full-on china-shop situation. You have been warned.

GEMINI
Ah, the intellectual bling of the zodiacal department store. There's nothing you love better than a mixed metaphor, and most of you can come up with a much better one than that last sentence. This year will provide an unprecedented smorgasbord of opportunities to theorise, analyse, philosophise and opine rings around friends, colleagues and family, which will annoy the bejesus out of all of them and probably lose you a promotion. Hah.

CANCER
Oh, get over yourselves. 2006 is going to be dangerous and depressing, so suck it up. Sulking will not help, and neither will passive aggression or hysterical sobbing. And for God's sake get out of the house occasionally, even if it does mean you have to dodge the shrapnel on your way to the milk bar. Pull yourselves together.

LEO
John Howard is a Leo, what can I say. You get to spend the year making Peter Costello's life a living hell, along with the lives of countless other Australians. You may even get to watch some of them being stomped on by the much-vaunted Elephant in the Room, the one that your fellow Leo the PM's good buddy Dubya had lowered into the room by crane after he had the roof blown off the house specially. Enjoy the spectacle while you can, since an elephant will avoid a lion if there are other things to step on. The rest of us are the spectacle.

VIRGO
Virgoans will be in their element this year. So much to be censorious about, so little time. Your obsession preoccupation with health will be well-founded as an epidemic of clinical depression looms in tandem with a bird flu ditto, while petrol prices rise so high along with the unprecedentedly outrageous cost of life-saving pharmaceuticals that the possibilty of buying food and clothes as well will retreat into the middle distance, where it will sit staring at you sullenly. If things get as bad as they well might, the expression 'nit-picking' (a favourite Virgoan pastime) could take on a new, less figurative meaning.

LIBRA
Even those Librans most determined to pour oil on troubled waters and make peace come hell or high water will be defeated even more often than usual this year. With any luck you will still have a bathroom vanity or well-lit dressing-table and make-up mirror to which you can retreat, and where you can spend the year trying to make up your mind which of your many lipsticks tones in best with your hair. Female Librans, your year will be even more exciting than that.

SCORPIO
No Scorp understands that the reason why the stage is always littered with corpses by the end of a Shakespearean or Jacobean revenge tragedy is that revenge is rightly the prerogative of the gods, not of men. Nor do you get it that the only route to redemption in Greek tragedy is to break the cycle of revenge. If you try to read Anna Karenina you will not get past the epigraph: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay.' The universal Scorpionic failure to understand this basic truth is the reason why it's a bad idea for any of you to enrol in a degree in literature this year. Or any other year. Now get away from me.

SAGITTARIUS
The state of the world this year will give you an unprecedented number of choices for adventure, good works and triage. Since what you call your cheerful honesty and everybody else calls your incredibly hurtful tactlessness will alienate many of your friends, this makes it an extra good year to travel, especially since your freakish luck will keep you safe while all around you succumb to personally invasive legislation, religious martyrs in all their manifestations, and up-themselves customs officials. You will be able to write your second-higher-degree dissertation in airports, bus stations, bomb shelters and yurts in the lulls between the exciting things. Tuck a jumbo box of condoms, a surgical mask and some Tamiflu into your luggage just in case; even Saggos get unlucky once every trillion years or so. Bastards.

CAPRICORN
Capricorns are dour, earthbound folk, not unlike Taureans except less sensual, more ambitious, and surgically scarred by the humour bypass. Lighten up, people, it's only the most multivalently dangerous period in living memory -- there's the revival of the Christian Right, for a start. No, scrap that -- most of you are probably central figures in it. Anyway, with any luck you will be so focused on getting your foot onto the next career rung you won't even notice the screams.

AQUARIUS
Earth to Water Carrier, do you read me? Over. Hello? Um ...

PISCES
Just keep on taking your meds and everything will be all right.