Sagittarius Horoscope for week of August 8, 2013

You have both a poetic and a cosmic license to stretch yourself further. It's best not to go too far, of course. You should stop yourself before you obliterate all boundaries and break all taboos and smash all precedents. But you've certainly got the blessings of fate if you seek to disregard some boundaries and shatter some taboos and outgrow some precedents. While you're at it, you might also want to shed a few pinched expectations and escape an irrelevant limitation or two. It's time to get as big and brave and brazen as you dare.

I'll leave the playing of saxophones to others. I don't think Scotch Whisky is for me either at this point. Do I have a name when I lose?

One of my "someday" projects was a 1/72nd scale aircraft carrier model based on the Colossus--class paper model from Poland. Well, it turned out that another company also made a carrier model--the nuclear-powered Enterprise, as she looked after her mid-life refitting. So I downloaded that model as well. Of course, I have a titanic task if I try to upscale it to 1/72...800 legal-size pages of printout! (As opposed to a mere 270 for Colossus!)

On Wikipedia's entry for the Enterprise, it said that five other ships in the class were planned before the design was superseded in favor of the Nimitz-class, which was much more efficient. Still, that sparked a "What If?" question in my mind...what would be the names of such ships if they had been built? I did a little research, but really couldn't find a good answer as such. Instead, I looked to my own life for my own naval names. Specifically, I looked at where I went to school and their concepts for mascots.

* USS Thames. My first school was United Scioto in Chilicothe, Ohio. Their mascot is the Sherman Tank (yes, their football team is the Tanks!); naming a ship for General Sherman was possible. But the Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh was from the area too, and he was defeated at the Battle of the Thames.

* USS Fort LeBeouf. Waterford, Pennsylvania. LeBeouf was the site of a battle in the French & Indian War that was important in the career of George Washington.

* USS Lancer and USS Trojan. Deer Lakes district, Pennsylvania; and Saint Petersburg College, Florida, respectively. Good names for Revolution-era ships, but never actually used by the U.S. Navy.

* USS Bald Eagle. Springstead in Spring Hill, Florida. At the time, the Royal Navy had ships named HMS Eagle, so specifying it as "Bald Eagle" made sense to avoid possible confusion in fleet maneuvers.

http://www.awiatsea.com/Privateers.html
http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/index.html

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Depends on where it is, of course. Previously, I'd planned out some science-fiction stories in which there was a set of eleven inhabitable planets in one star system, all named for signs of the Chinese Zodiac: Cuniculus (the Hare), Verres (the Boar), Equus (the Horse), Ovis (the Ram), Tigris (the Tiger), the twin worlds Anguis & Vipera (the Dragon and the Serpent), Pullus (the Cock), Simia (the Monkey), Bubulus (the Ox) and Muris (the Mouse).

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of May 27, 2010

Sagittarian writer Samuel Clemens was best known under his pen name, Mark Twain. But he tried many others, including Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Trismegistus, and Sergeant Fathom. Since you're in a phase when experiments with your persona would be productive, I suggest you dream up a few aliases of your own. I hope that at least one of them will be as wacky as "Blab" or "Snodgrass." Having a sense of humor about yourself will be helpful. It will ensure that your explorations at the frontiers of your identity will be fertile, fun, and never fear-based.

Enough people have called me "Scott" by mistake that I suppose I could adopt it in some fashion. In previous eras, I've been "Brenten Stair", "The Stem", "Stone Tepid" and "Steverino". I like playing with name generator programs too. But don't expect me to change my handle here anytime soon...sad as it is, it fits me about as well as the name my mother gave me.

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I Google myself on a regular basis. I have been surprised sometimes, like with my namesake Civil War soldier, and a horror parody story with a namesake character, and another namesake supposedly in Mongolia, but there is very little about me on the 'Net that I haven't initiated.

Got my umpteenhundredth con-job e-mail today.

The user's name: JOE PWN. I am not kidding. He uses Yahoo! out of Hong Kong.

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I Succumb.