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Go to realastrology.com for Rob Brezsny’s expanded weekly audio horoscopes and daily text-message horoscopes. Audio horoscopes also available by phone at 877-873-4888 or 900-950-7700.
ARIES (March 21-April 19)
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I urge you to flee from stale and rigid certainty. Rebel against dogmatic attitudes and arrogant opinions. Be skeptical of unequivocal answers to nuanced questions. Instead, dear Aries, give your amused reverence to all that’s mysterious and enigmatic. Bask in the glimmer of intriguing paradoxes. Draw inspiration and healing from the fertile unknown. For inspiration, write out this Mary Oliver poem and carry it with you: “Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”
TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
A blogger named Chaconia writes, “I’ve cultivated a lifetime of being low maintenance and easy-going, and now I’ve decided I’m done with it. Demanding Me is born today.” I’m giving you temporary permission to make a similar declaration, Taurus. The astrological omens suggest that in the coming weeks, you have every right to be a charming, enchanting and generous version of a demanding person. So I authorize you to be just that. Enjoy yourself as you ask for more of everything.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
The witch Lisa Chamberlain writes about the magical properties of colors. About brown, she says it “represents endurance, solidity, grounding, and strength.” She adds that it’s used in magic to enhance “balance, concentration, material gain, home, and companion animals.” According to my reading of the astrological omens, the upcoming weeks should be a deeply brown time for you Geminis. To move your imagination in a righteous direction, have fun wearing clothes in shades of brown. Grace your environment with things that have the hues of chestnut, umber, mahogany, sepia, and burnt sienna. Eat and drink caramel, toffee, cinnamon, almonds, coffee, and chocolate.
CANCER (June 21-July 22)
Cancerian poet Danusha Laméris discovered that earthworms have taste buds all over their bodies. Now she loves to imagine she’s giving them gifts when she drops bits of apples, beets, avocados, melons and carrots into the compost bin. “I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar.” But now that she understands “they bear a pleasure so sublime,” she wants to help worms fulfill their destinies. I mention this, Cancerian, because I suspect you may have comparable turnarounds in the coming weeks. Long-held ideas may need adjustments. Incomplete understandings will be filled in when you learn the rest of the story. You will receive interesting new information that changes your mind, mostly in enjoyable ways.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
You should never allow yourself to be tamed by others. That advice is always apropos for you Leos, and even more crucial to heed in the coming weeks. You need to cultivate maximum access to the raw, primal sources of your life energy. Your ability to thrive depends on how well you identify and express the beautiful animal within you. Here’s my only caveat: If you imagine there may be value in being tamed a little, in harnessing your brilliant beast, do the taming yourself. And assign that task to the part of you that possesses the wildest wisdom.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
Whenever you are contemplating a major decision, I hope you raise questions like these: 1. Which option shows the most self-respect? 2. Which path would be the best way to honor yourself? 3. Which choice is most likely to help you fulfill the purposes you came to earth to carry out? 4. Which course of action would enable you to express your best gifts? Are there questions you would add, Virgo? I expect the coming months will require you to generate key decisions at a higher rate than usual, so I hope you will make intensive use of my guiding inquiries, as well as any others you formulate.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
Libran blogger Ana-Sofia Cardelle writes, “I look back on past versions of myself with such love and tenderness. I want to embrace myself at different parts of my life.” I hope you’re inspired by her thoughts as you carry out the following actions: 1. Create an altar filled with treasures that symbolize major turning points in your destiny; 2. Forgive yourself for what you imagine to be old errors and ignorance; 3. Summon memories of the persons you were at ages 7, 12, and 17, and write a kind, thoughtful message to each; 4. Literally kiss seven different photos of your face from earlier in your life; 5. Say “thank you” and “bless you” to the self you were when you succeeded at two challenging tests in the past.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)
Scorpio-style intelligence typically has a fine intuitive grasp of how today’s realities evolved out of the deep patterns and rhythms of the past. That doesn’t mean you perfectly understand how karma works. In the coming weeks, I urge you to be eager to learn. Become even savvier about how the law of cause and effect impacts the destinies of you and your allies. Meditate on how the situations you are in now were influenced by actions you took once upon a time. Ruminate on what you could do in the near future to foster good karma and diminish weird karma.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)
Kabbalistic writer Simon Jacobson says, “Like a flame, the soul always reaches upward. The soul’s fire wants to defy the confines of life. It cannot tolerate the mediocrity and monotony of sheer materialism. Its passion knows no limits as it craves for the beyond.” Jacobson concludes, “Whether the soul’s fire will be a constructive or destructive force is dependent on the person’s motivation.” According to my astrological analysis, your deep motivations are likely to be extra noble and generous in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. So I expect that your soul’s fire will be very constructive.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
In the Spanish language, there’s the idiom pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo. Its literal translation is “thinking about the immortality of the crab.” It applies to a person engaged in creative daydreaming—her imagination wandering freely in hopes of rousing innovative solutions to practical dilemmas. Other languages have similar idioms. In Finnish, istun ja mietin syntyjä syviä means “wondering about the world’s early origins.” Polish has marzyć o niebieskich migdałach, or “dreaming about blue almonds.” I encourage you to enjoy an abundance of such explorations in the coming days, Capricorn. You need to fantasize more than usual.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)
My Aquarian reader Georgie Lee wrote to tell me what it’s like being an Aquarius. I offer it to you because you are potentially at the peak of expressing the qualities she names. She says, “Accept that you don’t really have to understand yourself. Be at peace with how you constantly ramble, swerve and weave to become more of yourself. Appreciate how each electric shift leads to the next electric shift, always changing who you are forever. Within the churning, ever-yearning current, marvel at how you remain eternal, steady, and solid—yet always evolving, always on a higher ground before.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20)
Here’s a good way to build your vibrancy: Use your emotional intelligence to avoid swimming against strong currents for extended periods. Swimming against strong currents is fine for brief phases. Doing so boosts your stamina and fosters your trust in your resilience. But I recommend you swim in the same direction as the currents or swim where the water is calm. In the coming weeks, I suspect you can enjoy many freestyle excursions as you head in the same direction as vigorous currents.
1. Like sea horses that give birth 8. On fire 14. Smart ____ 15. Neither’s partner 16. Get support from 17. “____ arigato, Mr. Roboto” 18. Hot temper 19. Bering, e.g. 20. Whac-____ (carnival game) 23. Like ____ out of water 24. Hit song from “Flashdance” 26. Leave it to beavers 28. “Rugrats” dad 29. Equivalents of ums 30. Certain sib 32. Yaks and oxen 35. Newbies 37. Richards of “Starship Troopers” 38. Insect represented in four places in this puzzle 41. Flower part 42. Plastic wrap brand 43. Imposes a new levy on 45. “Erin Burnett OutFront” channel 46. “Let’s kick things ____ notch!” 49. Spot for a stud 50. Hit the slopes 52. Half-page, perhaps 54. Thin-layered rock 58. “It’s ____ country!” 59. Trojan War hero 61. Barfly 63. “It’s ____ good cause” 64. They’re brewed at low temperatures 65. Cargo unit 66. Rx writers 67. Gertrude who swam the English Channel in 1926 68. Without ____ (pro bono)
1. “____ Bovary” 2. 12-time MLB All-Star Roberto 3. Slot machine fruit 4. Bacteria that may trigger a food recall 5. “Star Wars” nickname 6. Director Ephron 7. Blow up on Twitter 8. “White Girls” author Hilton 9. Spanakopita ingredient 10. 1968 British comedy “Only When I ____” 11. Diarist who wrote “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love” 12. Like the best brownie, say 13. Bubble over 21. Simple solution 22. Diet soda discontinued in 2020 25. 2019 Post Malone hit song 27. Covid vaccine maker 31. Pittance 33. Feature of many a New Orleans house 34. Aerosmith’s “Love ____ Elevator” 35. “Toodles!” 36. GPS lines 38. Be in store 39. Alienate 40. TV’s “Tic ____ Dough” 41. Event for select customers 44. Genre with Jamaican roots 46. Blow the top off? 47. He played James in four films before Daniel 48. “Relax, and that’s an order!” 51. “The gram” 53. “Oh no!” to some Minnesotans 55. Icky look 56. “Downton Abbey” title 57. Bart Simpson, e.g. 60. NNW’s opposite 62. It goes “Kaboom!”
Last week’s answers
SUDOKU X
Complete the grid so that each row, column, diagonal and 3x3 square contain all of the numbers 1 to 9. No math is involved. The grid has numbers, but nothing has to add up to anything else. Solve the puzzle with reasoning and logic. Solving time is typically 10 to 30 minutes, depending on your skill and experience.
WITH BABS DELAY
Broker, Urban Utah Homes & Estates, urbanutah.com
Scenic Utah
One of the best day trips out of Salt Lake City is to head southeast to Nine Mile Canyon near Price. The canyon name is a misnomer—it is not 9 miles long. It’s actually about 43 miles long from the highway, through the mountains and up to Duchesne, before the road back to Park City/Salt Lake.
Along the way, it’s worth a stop in Helper at the Balance Rock Eatery & Pub on Main Street for pancakes (all day!) bigger than the size of your head, burgers, sammies and dinner entrees. The little town has done a great job of changing from empty, boarded-up storefronts, saloons and hotels to a little vibrant art community of roughly 2,500 residents.
Once you’re full as a tick, it’s not far to the turnoff for Nine Mile Canyon. There, you’ll see thin layers of coal (it is Carbon County!) in the hills, smell fragrant cedar pines and sage brush, discover colors of the earth and, best of all, see the famous petroglyphs along the roadside.
Large “newspaper rocks” of stories depicting humanoids, sheep, deer, snakes, giant owls and many dots in patterns that look like calendars. Sadly, a—holes of this century have scrawled their own graffiti alongside the precious Native art, including adding vaginas and penises to some of the smaller human figures carved into the rock. It’s a felony and a bad federal rap to be caught damaging any of these sites.
Scenic Utah is a nonprofit organization out to win my heart. They appreciate our history and our vistas. These volunteers are out to educate us, the Legislature and larger communities about protecting dark skies and scenic byways by banning electronic billboards to reduce light pollution. They help ensure local governments keep their rights to regulate billboards that are “intrusive eyesores that harm the visual environment, reduce property values and detract from community character.”
They appreciate, as I do, our visual environs. They’ve found that more than 75% of Utahns believe billboards are intrusive eyesores that harm the visual environments where they are located.
Having previously served for eight years as a volunteer planning commissioner for Salt Lake City, I got a hard and fast education on how powerful the billboard companies are and how difficult it is to get rid of a single sign. Go to scenicutah.org to find out more about their vision and purpose. Best of all, they’re having a photo contest (deadline Sept. 1) with categories like “scenic night skies,” “my rural roots,” city and town parks, “visual pollution we wish would go away” and “off-the-beaten path” (i.e., remote or hard-to-reach places in our beautiful state). Let’s all celebrate and preserve the vistas of this great state. n PROFESSIONALS: LendingClub Bank National Association seeks the following positions in Lehi, UT: • Identity and Access Management Architect (C2-75411649): Lead the collection of business requirements and the design/development/ implementation of LendingClub’s corporate wide Identity and Access Management solution. • Senior Quality Assurance Engineer (C233268509): Build test frameworks, write automation scripts from scratch, and test the end to end system. • Financial Data Manager (C2-61809883): Write complex queries to transform raw data and perform business analytics, data cross-walk activities, identifying discrepancies, quality assurance activities and monitoring data integrity. May telecommute from anywhere in the U.S. up to 100% of the time. Background and employment checks may be required. To apply, email rmiller@lendingclub.com; must reference “RecruitingLC - job title - job code” in the subject line.
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NEWS of the WEIRD
Family Values, Funeral Edition
At a funeral on Aug. 6 at Rolling Hills Memorial Park in Richmond, California, a family brawl broke out after the deceased’s son and daughter started arguing, SFGate reported. Police were called to the scene around 1:30 p.m., where up to 20 family members abandoned the service to fight with each other. The 36-year-old brother got into a vehicle and “attempted to drive toward his sister in an aggressive way, but instead he struck another female and sent her to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries,” said Sgt. Aaron Pomeroy of the Richmond Police Department. He also managed to knock over headstones and break a water main, causing the funeral plot to fill up with water. The coup de grace was knocking over the casket; fortunately, the deceased did not fall out. When the brother finally emerged from the car, someone hit him with a cane to subdue him. The brother was later charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism.
Ooohhh-kaaaayyyy
Angel Domingo of Toronto is a big fan of trading items on resell websites. So when he moved into a new home and found a single cheese stick in the refrigerator, it was a no-brainer for him: Buy a billboard in Yonge-Dundas Square and offer the Black Diamond Cheese String in a trade for the best offer. “This is probably the strangest thing that I’ve ever had to offer up,” Domingo told Global News. “I guess some people really want it.” He’s received several offers for the cheese, the most unusual so far being a trade of two Persian cats. He hasn’t made a deal yet, but he’s in no hurry: There are months left before the expiration date.
Parent of the Year
The mother of a 6-year-old Butler County, Ohio, boy was arrested on Aug. 9 and charged with endangering a child and contributing to the delinquency of a child, WLWT-TV reported. The incident started when Olivia Eversole, a worker at a Marathon gas station in Hanover Township, saw the boy emerge from a car holding a Smirnoff Ice. Eversole asked the boy, “Do you know that you’re drinking a beer?” He replied, “Yup, this is me and my mommy’s favorite beer. We drink it all the time.” Eversole called police, but when deputies arrived, the mother, Victoria Hampton, 26, told them it was an accident and left with the boy. But when officers followed her home, they found the boy riding a scooter, holding another Smirnoff Ice. “You’ve got to be on your toes because you never know what’s going to happen,” Eversole said of the incident.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things!
As of July 1 in Delaware, retail stores were no longer allowed to supply plastic shopping bags for their customers’ purchases. No problem, said shoppers at Acme in Christiana—we’ll just walk out with your plastic shopping baskets. Delaware Online reported that the store’s supply of baskets has been wiped out, and manager Kaitlyn DiFrancesco is not going to buy more. Customers had the option of buying reusable shopping bags or paying 5 cents for paper bags at checkout, but instead, as soon as the ban went into effect, they started lifting the baskets. Employees were asked to stop customers, but some shoppers just ignored the warning or slipped out unseen.
Oh, Crap!
Drivers along I-94 in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, were forced to navigate an alarming obstacle course around 4:45 a.m. on Aug. 9, WISN-TV reported. As a flatbed truck hauled port-a-potties, at least seven of them slid off the truck and landed upright in the road, causing panic for drivers following behind. “I was like, ‘Is that a port-a-potty?’” said driver Alex Hilario. “Where did it even come from? Did they set it there? Because it was standing but rolling.” Hilario’s car collided with one portable john, but he was not hurt. Driver Vern Hicks also hit one of the johns and may have to total his car. Most of the units were hit by cars; one Waukesha County Sheriff’s deputy was heard saying he was “responding to that crappy situation.”
There Are Cameras Everywhere
Dr. Yue “Emily” Yu, 45, of Mission Viejo, California, was taken into custody on Aug. 4 after her husband alerted police that she was trying to poison him by adding Drano to his hot lemonade, The Mercury News reported. Yu’s husband first started noticing a chemical taste in his drink in March and suffered from “two stomach ulcers, gastritis and esophagitis,” according to his petition for divorce, filed on Aug. 5. He installed cameras in the kitchen and collected video evidence showing Yu reaching under the sink and pouring something from a Drano bottle into his drink. Yu’s attorney says she “vehemently and unequivocally denies ever attempting to poison her husband or anyone else.” She was released after posting bail.
Wait, What?
Victor Hugo Mica Alvarez, 30, started off this year’s Pachamama (Mother Earth) Festival with a bang, Metro News reported. After drinking heavily during the festival’s opening on Aug. 1, Alvarez said he wound up in Achacachi, Bolivia—50 miles from El Alto, where he’d passed out—trying to claw his way out of a buried casket. He alleges that he was a human sacrifice: “We went dancing. And afterwards I don’t remember. The only thing I remember is that I thought I was in my bed, I wanted to get up to go urinate and I couldn’t move,” Alvarez said. He said he was able to break glass in the coffin, and dirt started pouring in. After crawling out, he asked a nearby person for help. Local police didn’t believe Alvarez, saying he was too drunk to know what had happened and that he should come back when he was sober.
Bright Idea
Looking for new kicks that’ll mark you as a beer-loving fashion icon? Of course you are. Heineken has partnered with sneaker designer and customizer Dominic Ciambone to create Heinekicks—signature green, white and red high-tops with a built-in bottle opener and the company’s newest brew, Heineken Silver, sloshing around in the soles. Oddity Central reported that the shoes provide a unique feeling. “I can’t say I’ve ever designed a sneaker that contains actual beer before,” Ciambone said. Probably not—and only a handful of people will ever get to wear them, with just 32 pairs scheduled to hit the market in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Unclear on the Concept
Miles Routledge, 23, of Birmingham, England, has stirred up controversy by traveling repeatedly to Afghanistan and cozying up to members of the Taliban, the Daily Star reported. Routledge posted on Twitter on Aug. 9, “I am officially Afghanistan’s largest exporter to England. 150+ flags, patches and rugs,” with a photo of his loot. But what’s really got people up in arms is a rug he bought depicting the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Routledge believes the rug doesn’t glorify the attacks; instead, it was made “by Afghan women to tell a story of a historical event. Hundreds of American soldiers who signed up to the military because of 9/11 have this rug in their homes,” he claimed. Routledge called Taliban members “kind blokes” because he had tea with them after stumbling into their compound during an April trip.
Babs De Lay
Selling homes for 38 years in the Land of Zion
old hippies
Julie “Bella” De Lay
Realtor 801-784-8618 bella@urbanutah.com
Selling homes for 8 years
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