Polycarp has spent the last month working on another project and regrets his absence. As always, click on the highlighted words to uncover veiled clues, or you could just Google the phrase "melt-down." If you'd like Polycarp's free-range, fair market staff to send you a note whenever there's a new post, drop him a note at Polycarpblog@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18): This has been a touchy, difficult period for Aquarians, especially if they're mayors of very large cities. On the other hand, at least one seems to have hit on a way to ensure he gets good press. And unlike the previous six or seven times when Mrs. Aquarius has thrown him out of the house for having affairs, this time she means it. Pisces (February 19-March 20): Pisces, Polycarp recommends that you spend the next few weeks thinking about pederasty and money, and how indulging one leads to loss of the other. Because of an odd tangle of circumstances--mainly his indolent church-going habits--Polycarp may still be a member of a parish in your Archdiocese, and therefore you may be in a position to excommunicate him directly, Cardinal Pisces. Please don't--he swears he's going to go to church again some day soon. But. Ahem. Your eminence, isn't $660 million a lot to pay to avoid testifying? Polycarp gave you some of that money, and so did a lot of other good people with less to give. We hate to suggest it, but it's almost as though you're ... hiding something. Polycarp says papal aspirations are no longer in the stars. What else are you hiding? It won't be worse than this, but Polycarp is curious.
Aries (March 21-April 19): It's been a bad week for North Carolina Arieses, I'm afraid. It was sad that the judge rejected your suggestion that your punishment be limited to opening an eye care clinic for the poor, and instead sentenced you to five years and three months. It didn't help when your friend the president of the Christian Action League got busted for soliciting sex from a scary-looking prostitute. Polycarp predicts that the next 63 months will provide ample time to reflect on the path your life has taken over. And by the way, the poor called. They don't want you looking at their eyes, anyway.
Taurus (April 20-May 20): It occasionally happens that the stars dish out to us what we have previously dished out on others, Taurus. So, for example, if you happened to be a Republican congressman elected on a Christian values platform and raised your visibility by jumping on the "impeach Bill" bandwagon, harping salaciously on the impropriety of illicit oral sex with cooperative young interns, ten years later you may find yourself publicly humiliated by revelations that you frequent brothels and call madams to hire call girls from the Senate floor. Entertaining as this is, for your sake we hope your wife has softened in her approach to this kind of marital problem.
Gemini (May 21-June 20): Geminis are twins of course, and the stars say they're often two different things intertwined together. Competence and incompetence, for example, as in your case. Who does your hiring, Gemini? Somebody you lured away from FEMA? Your Southern Regional Campaign Manager just got outed in a sex scandal, and your South Carolina Chairman is now in rehab and will soon be in jail after getting busted for cocaine trafficking. Don't you do background checks up in New York?
Cancer (June 21-July 22): Polycarp suggests that all Cancers go immediately to a dictionary and look up the word "progress," so that next week if the phrase "progress in Iraq" is used in a press conference, it might bear some relationship to reality. The other big news last week-end was that you had a colonoscopy and Dick Cheney was back in charge while you were out, just like he was the whole first term. Polycarp just wishes he'd fired a certain Leo Attorney General before you woke up.
Leo (July 23-August 22): As you're out and about, Leo, listening to the birds sing and breathing the air of the free, looking at your pretty wife and not practicing law because you've been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude, just thank your lucky stars for the loyalty of your friends. Of course, first they used you as a fall guy and threw you to the curb like yesterday's garbage, but it could have been worse. As Polycarp's friend Mark the opera critic said, "Who would have thought that Paris Hilton would do more jail time than Scooter Libby?"
Virgo (August 23-September 22): This last month has been a time of falling fortunes and depleted bank accounts for you, Virgo. You've performed the most dazzling front-runner collapse since Ed Muskie in 1972. Who's your campaign manager, Lindsay Lohan? You were a Naval aviator, for God's sake. Stop complaining about your sweaters in a whiny homophobic way and take command. Oh--and saying "Jeez, I really screwed up on this Iraq deal, didn't I?" might help.
Libra (September 23-October 22): This has been a week--no, a month--no a year--in which well-meaning Libra candidates have once again faded into the wallpaper. We're glad you're still out there, Libra, being honest, acting like a pre-Bush Democrat, running for president (yet again) and espousing tolerance and environmentalism. You're a good man and an honest public servant, so of course you have no chance at all of getting niminated. You're what Ralph Nader could have been, and you don't cause as much collateral damage. Keep it up, Libra. Polycarp is sure you're influencing the race somehow.
Scorpio (October 23-November 21): Scorpio, the stars say you are going through a phase of childish bickering and pointless sniping with a junior Leo from Illinois, and that you should both knock it off immediately. It is way too soon for the front runners to start tearing into each other like Voldemort and Harry Potter Nevertheless, Polycarp predicts that you two idiots will keep up this stupidity until neither one of you is a front runner, and then you'll go on bickering about whose fault that is. This won't be the worst thing in the world for the Democratic Party, of course, because once you've shredded each other it's possible that somebody with a chance to win the general election would then become the front-runner. A well-meaning Gemini, for example.
Sagittarius (November 22-December 21): Another drug-addled, limitedly talented young celebrity recently broke your record for shortest time between release from rehab to complete collapse into insane, slobbering drunkenness, Sagittarius, so it's time for you to step up to the plate and arrange a complete liquefaction of all sensibility and dignity in front of photographers and reporters, preferably involving expensive clothing that does not belong to you and a small, annoying dog.
Capricorn (December 22-January 19): So now your story is that not only did she kill herself with your gun minutes after she walked into your house, but that you were nowhere near her and the blood leapt across the room to spatter on your clothes? This is lunacy, but you always were a bullying loon, so this fits, in a homophonic way. Polycarp thinks a more subdued look may be in order for your next residence, where the walls are not of sound.
I have been trying for years to figure out exactly how much lead time Parade magazine needs for an event to be reflected in its content. They seem to prepare it about about a week before it's actually published. This leads to the occasional gaffe, such as when they reported that Derby-winner Barbero was alive and well in a pasture in Kentucky when in fact his death had been the biggest news story of the preceding week.
Posts
