Saturn Diego: Dick gets it right.

Yesterday morning, beleaguered San Diego mayor Dick Murphy announced he will resign effective July 15. Murphy's resignation comes only five months after he claimed victory in a hotly contested three-way mayoral race; Murphy actually garnered fewer votes than write-in candidate Donna Frye. It also comes as San Diego teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and several councilmembers face legal investigation - including Deputy Mayor Michael Zucchet, who is in line to assume duties of acting mayor in the event a special election is held to replace the mayor after July 15.

Marc Penfield's Horoscopes of the Western Hemisphere gives the chart for the city of San Diego as July 16, 1769 at 8:52 am (he uses Porphry house system and PST). The chart below shows San Diego's wheel with the city's planets on the inner wheel, and transits for Murphy's resignation on the outer wheel. Dig it: San Diego is having a Saturn return, and the April 8 solar eclipse squared the city's Sun and Saturn. True to Saturn's symbolism, the city's leaders are under increasing pressure to answer for the decisions that have led the city to the brink of financial ruin.

Murphy was an unpopular mayor who would like to be remembered for getting a second baseball stadium built, rather than for overseeing a council that systematically underfunded the city employees' pension fund. By stepping aside now, he at least honors Saturn's command that we step up to the plate, take responsibility, and do what's right.

Aries eclipse postscript

As nice a summing up of the recent Aries eclipse as I can imagine, albeit uttered in an entirely non-astrological context. Compliments of the peerlessly eloquent Al Swearengen:

Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.

Eclipsed!

I came down with a humdinger of a cold a week and a half ago, and it's still kicking my ass. Meanwhile every blogger and his mother has already weighed in on the Pope, Charles and Camilla, that woman who died (Shiavo?), etc. I have no further insights to offer about these earth shattering events.

I sure am hearing some interesting real-life eclipse stories from people, though, ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. I actually got to observe that one from the sidelines, more or less, since 19 Aries doesn't aspect anything in my chart very closely. A bit of a break, actually, since that eclipse point exactly opposed my husband's Mercury - and between that and Mercury being (until recently)retrograde, he's had a bit of a time of it. Within the span of a couple of days, his car broke down and his computer crashed. Poor guy.

He recovered his computer and I hope he can get his car running, because the lunar eclipse on the 24th almost exactly squares my natal Mercury. I've been busily backing up my computer and checking out deals on rental cars. Do you think it would be a bad idea for me to buy my long-awaited laptop computer this weekend, a week before the eclipse? Yeah, I thought so. Dammit.

Tempting the gods.

Charles, Charles, Charles... It seems to me that when you schedule your wedding on the day of a solar eclipse (square Saturn), with Mercury retrograde, you're just tempting the gods.