LONDON: If we do not know exactly where Osama bin Laden is to be found at this moment, information on what sort of time he’s having is easily come by.

Naturally, it has not been a great few days. “Mars is about to fill you with nervous energy,” the British astrologer Jonathan Cainer warned Osama (and others who share is birth sign) this week.

“You are likely to be burning off calories, even when sitting still. Your mind is racing and wrestling with the desire to conquer a big source of concern and conflict. You have got an appetite for action, not food.”

That, of course, is assuming that the March 10 birthday supplied by Interpol for Osama is correct, making him a Pisces. But another date, that of July 30, has also been mentioned. That would convert him into a Cancer (like George Bush). In which case, Cainer’s prognosis seems no less eerily apt: “Remember that, just as only weak people yearn to prove how strong they are, true titans need have no fear of seeming temporarily small.”

March or July? Cancer or Pisces? Since Sept 11, astrologers have been obsessed with establishing the true birth co-ordinates for Osama, exchanging learned speculation on the internet. Scholarly consensus in this frenzy of retrospective prediction seems to favour Pisces.

“I would rule out Cancer because of body type,” decides one expert.

“A fifth house Pisces Sun with a Scorpio Ascendant and a Cancer Moon in the eight,” concludes another, “O yeah, he did it all right”. Another adds: “Wasn’t Hitler a Pisces also? That would certainly explain his hypnotic hold on his followers, delusional aspirations, and spiritual fanaticism especially with negative aspects.”

So far there has been comparatively little debate about the fact that all the world’s astrologers appear to have missed any auspices pointing towards cataclysmic events and vast numbers of dead on a day which, it seems to be generally agreed, changed the course of history.

Not a bit. Even those who have alluded to the communication breakdown between the planets and their mundane interpreters are at pains to emphasise that prediction is not — contrary to vulgar belief — the business of astrologers.

Meanwhile, it is business as usual. The same astrologers who last year overlooked Sept 11 are, quite unabashed, about to issue summaries of the non-events of 2002. The only discernible effect of 2001 has been to make them more cautious. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.