Humor:

Letter from a misinformed reader

Dear editor,

I am writing abougt your horoscope. At no point did it warn me there was going to be a big war soon.

I am a Taurus.
But I also note that innocent people under the star signs of Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pieces, Aries, Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo similarly were not warned.

How can this happen in this day and age?

Okay, I do accept that the reason your horoscope has not yet predicted I will win $1 million in the lottery is because I haven't been allowed out to buy a lottery ticket recently.

But a war?

How could your astrologer miss something that big?
Was she too busy working out which planets were aligning to notice that countries here on earth are falling in behind each other too?
Is this the standard of accuracy we can expect throughout your miserable newspaper from now on?

Over these past few idle years, being a Taurus, I have become a bit of a student of astrology - and I am pretty sure I can now sort the chaff from the wheat.

I have received this past week several passages via e-mail purportedly by French physician and astrologer Nostradamus who published in his 1555 book Centuries 900 prophetic quatrains in cryptic verse.
Some of these have referred to the recent attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, one even was interpreted as a prediction of the fall of Australian airline Ansett.
All of them, however, were bogus - composed by mischievous people and circulated by the gullible. And not one of them tipped who was going to win the Melbourne Cup this year.

Although some interpreters say that Nostradamus actually foretold the Great Fire of London in 1666, the deaths of several monarchs, details of the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, and World War II and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, I come from the school of thought that thinks the verses are so vague, and so full of anagrams, and Hebrew, Latin and Portuguese words, they could be applied to anything.

I do have a prediction of my own though.

And I promise you this one is true (if you are in doubt about my track record in following through, feel free to check with Nostradamus quatrain 534 or with Detective Inspector Smith at the city police station).

Unless you lift your game, I will never buy your stinking, rotten, lousy newspaper again.

Jerome O'Fury
Ward 4D,
Puddleduck Hospital
for the Criminally Insane

PS: My doctors have told me not to get too excited, but I feel I have to say something else. Boo.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it