Mercury in Retrograde

[Drunk Monk]

I've oft made reference to Merc-in-Retro and Yeti thought it was 

Mercenaries incensed by retro-rockets?

so I figured I'd best explain. 


Mercury in Retrograde is a dumb theory that early astronomers made up to maintain their incorrect view of the solar system. Early astronomers thought everything revolved around the earth, not the sun. If you look at the planets that way, they appear to go backwards at times. They called that 'retrograde motion' and it figured into astrology significantly. Every planet has its retrograde period. Mercury's retrograde is a time of chaos. Mercury governs communication and transportation (remember the winged shoes - Merc was the messenger) so when he goes backwards, everything goes askew. 

Now I don't have that much faith in astrology. I wrote a column for KFTC for 20 years on it. The core was based on translation of a real Feng Shui master, rough translated by Gigi, then smoothed out by me. He was an odd astrologer, making predictions like 'you'll have diarrhea this whole month' so there was a lot of adjustment, a lot of working with bad translations, some of which even became poetic. cf knows because he had to copy edit them. Our Feng Shui master could hit it right now and again, just enough to make us pause. 

Merc-in-ret is a Western astrology thing and Stacy brought it to my attention because she's into astrology. We had to get a reading to see if we were a good fit before marrying. I blew it off at first, but then it started to get weird. Maybe I'm just hypersensitive during merc-in-ret. I dunno. But I'm always mindful. It works for me because it's so absurd, a 'scientific' assumption based on a false paradigm, like Piltdown man. 

I'll start noting Merc-n-rets here. There are usually 3 periods a year. We're in the second one now - June 18-July 12. Today's example was that my chormebook froze in a weird way like it has never done before. I unfroze it after searching the web for solutions, but that was very merc-n-ret.