What's New with Astrology?

Ive been a bit confused and maybe somebody who knows astrology can help me out on this: Now that the International Astronomical Association has been debating what's a planet and what's not, how does that affect the practice of astrology?

Not so long ago, I was looking up my daily horoscope on Yahoo. Whoever their astrologer is, he really sucks. He gets real technical about which planet is going into which house and really obscure stuff like that and I don't think anybody cares. People just want to know if it's a good day to buy Pizza, or whatever your concern is. Anyways, this guy mentioned that the asteroid Vespa was doing something or other and I thought about that.

The ancients who invented astrology for sure did not know that there was a big hunk of rock out there named Vespa. Neither did they know about Pluto or Neptune of any of the other bodies out there that figure into modern day astrology. Were their astrological readings horribly off because they weren't correctly accounting for these unknown bodies?

The astronomy association is split on what should or should not be a planet. Right now it looks like if it's round, it orbits the sun, and it's not somebody else's moon it's going to be a planet. The problem is that they've since discovered other bodies that fit that definition and we could end up having as many as twelve or more planets. So, what it looks like they're going to do is come up with a category of second class planets which Pluto would be demoted to.

The new class of second class planets would be called Dwarf planets or perhaps planetoids. The term 'Pluton' has already been thrown around, but no astronomer much liked the idea except for the one who came up with it.

One of the new possible planets would be called Xena and is located out in the Oort Cloud and is larger than Pluto and it's moon Charon. There may, in fact, be many such types of bodies out there and who knows? There might be ones as big as the Earth or bigger. Why shouldn't there be?

Do astrologers have some similar association as the astronomical association? And how do they affect each other? The astronomers don't believe that astrologers exist even though the astrologers were the orginal astronomers. I think the astronomers want to disassociate themselves from their roots on this one. But quite clearly the astrologers do asknowledge the astronomers as witnessed by my yahoo astrologer. I think they want to cover themselves as much as possible with the stink of science, if they can.

It's always been a sore point between the two how exactly the planets or planetoids or dwarf planets or asteroids effect our daily lives. It's not gravity or magnetism or anything that's measurable, but nonetheless whether we like it or not, they still might. Just think about centrifugal force. Doesn't that exist because there is something far away and scientists are at a loss to explain that one. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to check my daily horoscope. But not at Yahoo, because that guy sucks.

Steve Sommers is the author of: Evil Super-Villains need Love, Too. http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow