Chinese horoscopes
A recent radio programme prompted me to check out my chinese horoscope. Apparently I am a fire horse, which unfortunately gives away my age. So now I'm going to have to update my lunar sign so that it is in tune with my date of birth which I switched to 1972 a little while ago. It is not a failure to own up to the years I've spent here, it is more a realignment of my chronological age with my youthful good looks!

So the stories go, fire horses are often killed at birth due to the shame and trouble that they will bring their families. I know that both my parents contemplated this on numerous occasions when I was a small boy, when they caught me painting their eiderdown to match their brass bed, when I was kicking the lower cans from the pyramids at the local supermarket (Newtonian Law needed verification) and any one of the many of my youthful crimes. I never really practiced arson and gave up the violin and wasn't a nerdy boy with dreams of world domination, which accounts for my failure to achieve the giddy heights of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Bill Gates.

I don't believe in the whole horoscope thing as I don't see that 1/12 of the worlds population will have a similar day tomorrow nor that everyone born on March 19th will have a great Monday next week because the paranormal hack in the paper says it will be great for Pisces. Chinese horoscopes have a little higher granularity, it taking 60 years for one cycle of the combined element and animal signs, still tosh though I'm sure. I was so fed up with people telling me what virgos were like that I changed my star sign to Chevrolet. Apparently I am a typical virgo, you know intelligent, good looking, virile so I might change back. Anyway, for the purposes of the next paragraph I am going to suspend disbelief.

My predictions for 2006 are:

• My project will go live with much fanfare, anxiety and raised voices in March
• A minority Conservative government will be elected in Canada next week
• They'll realise it was a mistake in 2007
• I will meet a wonderful woman and fall in love
• Someone you know will listen to an ELO number
• General motors fresh new strategy will be to put a marginally larger engine in the same crappy cars.
• Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker will each release a new compilation album of hits they had years ago in much the same way as they do every year.
• The American public will realise that Laura Bush is actually more of an idiot than her husband, he was born simple and can't help it, she married into idiocy or was it money?
• I will fritter away a lot of cash on rubbish I don't need.

On another note I am leaving Toronto on Wednesday to go home to Costa Rica for a week. Then after I get back here I have some flights booked for a weekend in New York City (fortuitously during the Chinese New Year celebrations) and some time next month I really need to go to Panama.

This weekend has been far too short!