August is known as the "silly season" in the media in the United States and the United Kingdom, as newspaper editors faced with legislators all gone on holiday struggle in vain to fill their pages and resort to, well, silly stories.
So in that exalted tradition, today's column will consider some things that are often revered by those very silly people in the New Age movement: astrology, hypnosis and out-of-body experiences.
Let's get astrology out of the way first. In fact it is so silly that I can barely bring myself to write the word. The following story isn't really about astrology, but I expect some crackpots will look to it to support astrological predictions. I'll help them: I predict that children born in the northern hemisphere summer — especially those under the signs of Cancer and Leo — will be more likely to be short-sighted when they grow up.