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February 9th to February 14th 2004
MONDAY February 9 Valentine's Day / Mills and Boon comment Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Yet true love is not always quite as simple and superficial as Messrs Mills and Boon would like us to believe. There are times when we all wish that we could understand more about our other half and vice versa! Why do our loved-ones annoy us so much sometimes? Why do we sometimes cause offence without meaning to? Is there anything we can do to make things better? vetica> TUESDAY February 10 Birds and Their Sense of Direction email I have had a lot of mail from readers about birds and their sense of direction... Carolyn writes: "I have a dear woodpigeon friend who watches my car set out for work in the morning and will meet me and sometimes fly alongside me at various stages along the road, before setting off across country 'as the crow flies', either to wait at my final destination or to get on with his own life back home." And D J Sullivan says: "Most all of early man's pathways came about by following animal trails (animals do have a knack for finding food, water, etc., after all). So, if birds have been observed following 'our' roads, what's the big deal? They were 'their' roads first." WEDNESDAY February 11 Birds and Their Sense of Direction second email Dear Jonathan, Following your remarks about birds, you may like to know that swallows no longer tend to fly over the French Alps while migrating. They have started using the Mont Blanc Tunnel instead. But then, is it really surprising that creatures of creation are creative? I take your point about science, though. There is a story about a scientist who took away the legs of a grasshopper and told it to jump. When it just sat there, the academic reached his great conclusion. "If you remove a grasshopper's legs... you make it deaf!" Best wishes, Hakkon Dear Hakkon, THURSDAY February 12 Telephone telepathy by Rupert Sheldrake When the telephone rings in the house of a noted professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line because their silver tabby cat, Whiskins, rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. "Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative miaows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end", she says. "If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice." The cat responds even when he telephones home from field trips in Africa or South America. Many people know when a particular person is ringing before they pick up the receiver. Janet, in Budleigh Salterton, says that with her two daughters, "I start thinking about them just before the phone rings. It happens too with friends. I'm always saying 'I was just thinking about you' when I answer the phone to them". Through extensive surveys, my colleagues and I have found that telephone telepathy is the commonest kind of psychic experience in the modern world. We have done hundreds of experiments to see if telepathy is really involved, rather than mere coincidence. For these tests, subjects themselves nominate four callers, usually close friends or family members. In each trial, they receive a call from one of these people at a prearranged time. The caller is picked at random by the experimenter by throwing a dice. The participant has to say who the caller is before picking up the phone. If people were just guessing, they would be right about one time in four, or 25per cent of the time. We have so far conducted more than 800 trials, and the average success rate is 42 per cent, very significantly above the chance level of 25per cent, with astronomical odds against chance coincidence. We have found that these effects do not fall off with distance. Some of our subjects were from Australia or New Zealand, and they could identify who was calling just as well as with people back home as with friends only a few miles away. FRIDAY February 13 Valentine's Day comment and Let's Get Sirius by Bernard Fitzwalter It's Friday the thirteenth. And tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Luck and love do not always have a close relationship. Many seemingly fortunate people have problematic personal lives. Many folk with happy hearts know that this, on its own is no guarantee of worldly success. So can the weekend bring good fortune AND emotional joy? Well... as my colleague Bernard Fitzwalter points out below, Venus and Mars are now in alignment. So we can't rule it out! Let's Get Sirius... Bernard Fitzwalter writes: Orion, the giant with the belt of three stars, has lately been looming large in the South. Just beneath him and to the left is the blazing light of Sirius, brightest star in the sky. In January it's already dark before Sirius rises, while in March it has already risen by the time the sun sets. But on just one day in the year Sirius rises exactly as the sun sets. It happened this week. For the ancient world, before calendars, this special day meant the end of winter, and therefore time for fertility rituals to make both crops and families grow. Young men would send love tokens to their intended partners... and the Valentine cards and presents we send today are a continuation of that. If you're making a wish for new love this weekend, wish twice. Once on Venus, the love goddess herself; easy to see in the west, and once on Sirius as he comes up in the east! SATURDAY February 14 Good Relationships comment Good relationships don't have to be wildly volatile but they do need a degree of mutual challenge. There is nothing very exciting about agreement. Couples who are competitive often bond better than supposedly perfect partners. That's why I am always suspicious when people say "Me and my intended were made for each other. We have such a lot in common." Er... if you are so similar, why do you need each other? What lessons will you learn together? If you just prop up each other's preferences and prejudices how will either of you ever change and grow? We don't want to live lives of constant conflict. But even the most peaceloving, easygoing folk need a little dynamic drama in their love lives. We should, therefore, not be too disheartened when difficulties begin to arise. These don't necessarily spell the beginning of the end. Sometimes they can represent the chance to take the relationship to a deeper, much more fulfilling level. Astrologers know this. That's why they find it so hard to say which signs make the best pairs. Anyone can get along with anyone if they are willing to try hard enough to reach an understanding. And sometimes, the most seemingly 'obvious' alignments are not so satisfactory. To really know what's going on between two people, you need to work with their full date, time and place of birth. You need to draw up a horoscope for each and then slowly compare the two, detail by detail.
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