IF IT DOESN'T make me an instant millionaire, provide tips about police speed traps or advise me when my cats are about to go off a particular brand of pet food before I buy 24 cans of the stuff, I find any system of fortune-telling about as useful as breasts on a boar hog.

To be honest, astrology has had a fairly secure place in this, my abattoir of useless trivia. To my ears, the "music of the spheres" has much the same cacophonous appeal as Tina Turner in an echo chamber.

Or had. Now that I've had occasion to ponder the subject (nothing but the awful "Friends" on TV, the next-door neighbor is no longer trying to install a porch lamp with a power drill and the cat has ripped out the last five pages of my Robert Ludlum paperback), I figure I may have misjudged the zodiac folk.

I've done a bit of reading up (among other things, a nifty way to avoid hanging pictures), and it occurs to me that astrology could be, in fact, a lot of fun, what with Mars colliding with Jupiter on the cusp of the moon in the normally sedate house of Virgo, but watch out for Mercury in the thermometer.

I've now taken to reading my daily horoscope in one of the national newspapers, and it's amazing how prescient it all is. I feel as if someone is looking into my very soul, or at least my pocket diary, and maybe peeking into my medicine cabinet. Take, for example, the following snippet:

"Though it may not seem straightforward at first, you need to persuade loved ones that you know what you're doing in terms of some unusual actions you're about to propose."

Awesome. Even at that moment, I was using my tactics of persuasion, enhanced by my growing knowledge of astrology, to outline to my wife Elizabeth how and why I had bought a World War II vacuum tube radio for 40 bucks and a fishing rod.

The fact that she appeared to have been struck speechless I can attribute only to some form of interplanetary intervention, since this is something that doesn't happen all that often.

Then there was this item from another horoscope reading in the local rag: "Calm down and tell yourself you're feeling the effects of a run-in between Jupiter and Mercury, which is making you rather headstrong at a time when your moves should be subtle and precise."

That bit of foresight and insight caught my mood exactly and prevented me from decapitating my carpenter, or at least having him feel the effects of a run-in between his nose and my fist when I discovered he had built some quite expensive bookshelves precisely 1/4 inch too wide.

(This, incidentally, was the same carpenter who removed the front door to our cottage in the midst of a winter gale in an attempt, ultimately fruitless, to get a bookcase he had built too long inside and up the stairs. My assault on his eardrums came before I sought solace in the stars and the Milky Way and Sagittarius and all.)

Or how about this slice of horoscopic advice: "Loved ones or friends are relying on you to put some sparkle into a set-up that might seem otherwise too dull for words. You know you can handle it."

Which, knowing that any ordinary old clock is too dull for words, is why I bought one that runs backwards for our at-home office.

"I'm a Pisces, and we Pisceans are known for doing things differently and imaginatively," I protested when my bride started harping about having to look into a bloody mirror to find out what time it was.

"You're a loony, that's what you are," she opined by way of keeping up her end of what was rapidly becoming a one-dimensional dialogue, "and one of these days, the folks with the butterfly nets are going to come and get you."

I checked on her horoscope for the day. She's a Taurus, which means bullheaded, and her zodiac entry read: "Your mistake could be to talk from an emotional standpoint. There are times when you have to be pleasant but detached."

I thought muttering imprecations about "batty Pisceans" and asking just which side of my family tree it was that suffered from Dutch elm disease was a bit much, but then I breathed a sigh of acceptance that she doesn't have her finger on the pulse of the cosmos as I do.

Anyway, I'm no longer taking this zodiac thingie lightly, and if I do seem up there flying along on the moonbeams, I'm not alone. The British academic establishment has just forked over $750,000 to fund a university degree in astrology.

(Of course, it also must be said that Britain is chockablock with witches' covens, folks who spend time trying to photograph pixies and a fair number who believe the lunar lands were frauds staged in the Arizona desert, or maybe by druids at Stonehenge fed up with watching "Friends" and the English soccer team.)

I do admit that while the astrologers run a pretty good line in advice and occasionally helpful guidance, I've yet to see much in the way of really practical prognostication, such as perhaps a few winning numbers on the national lottery, or a sure-fire nag in the fifth at Haymarket, or a 24-hour heads-up on the New York Stock Exchange close.

In the meantime, my own prognostication is that three cats are about to develop a lean and hungry look.

It's in their stars, if they continue to turn their noses up at two dozen cans of ca food I've spent good money buying, not having foreseen yet another mutation in their taste buds.

Thought for the Week: Nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't have to do it.

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