From today's local paper:

"Thanks to Earth’s wobble, astrological signs are, well, bunk. (Or even more bunk than you might expect.) Astrological signs are determined by the position of the sun relative to certain constellations on a person’s day of birth. The problem is, the positions were determined more than 2,000 years ago.

Nowadays, the stars have shifted in the night sky so much that horoscope signs are nearly a month off.

“Astrology tells us that the sun is in one position, whereas astronomy tells us it’s in another position,” said Joe Rao, SPACE.com’s skywatching columnist and a lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium.

The shift is caused by precession, the wobble in the Earth’s axis caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon to the Earth’s equator.

Even if the astrological signs were stable, there’s no evidence the stars have anything to do with people’s day-to-day existence.

One study in 2006 published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences used data from more than 15,000 people and found no relationship between date of birth and personality.

Despite the complete lack of scientific and observational evidence for astrology, 25 percent of Americans still believe in it, a recent Pew survey found. So here are the “real” dates of astrological signs, according to astronomers:

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17.
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.
"

According to this new plan, Mr. Troutbend is supposedly an Aries, and I'm supposedly a Cancer. I could be a Cancer, a home-body, but there is no way he could shed his stubborn, tenacious Taurus personality to become a force to be reckoned with Aries.

Not that we believe in the zodiac.