IFLA: The “Cowboy” Edition of the Horoscope for the Week of April 19

by | Apr 19, 2026 | IFLA | 56 comments

The sun moves into Taurus this week, so there’s where the theme comes from. Signs are up from Aries, but everyone knows that beef > mutton.

The week starts off hopefully with the Moon and Venus bringing the love. Monday might be a bit annoying and smelly. Tuesday and Wednesday are particularly important if you’re a ruler of some sort, with disruption in your official business leading to equivalent disruptions in your personal life. I guess Tuesday also matters if you live in a country with such a ruler.

Aries: The Sun reversed – Even reversed, this is still a good card meaning material happiness, contentment and growth.

Taurus: Knight of Cups – Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement.

Gemini: 10 of Wands reversed – Contrarieties, difficulties, intrigues, and their analogies.

Cancer: 4 of Coins – The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance. 

Leo: Queen of Cups – Good, fair woman; honest, devoted woman, loving intelligence, gift of vision, success, happiness, pleasure, wisdom, virtue; a perfect spouse and a good mother.

Virgo: 6 of Coins reversed – Getting snookered or potentially bamboozled,

Libra: 8 of Cups reversed – Great joy, happiness, feasting.

Scorpio: The Moon – Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error. 

Sagittarius: Page of Coins reversed – Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavorable news.

Capricorn: Ace of Swords –  Triumph, the excessive degree in everything, conquest, triumph of force.

Aquarius: 3 of Swords reversed – Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.

Pisces: Page of Swords reversed – monitoring parties working against you, unfavorable surveillance, the unforeseen, unprepared state.

About The Author

Not Adahn

Not Adahn

Despite all my rage, I am still just an impeccably dressed rat.

56 Comments

    • Threedoor

      Story of my life.

    • UnCivilServant

      Sorry, but those checks are for an account that’s been closed and sent to collections for prolonged overdraft.

  1. Gustave Lytton

    From ded thred, the anchor babies numbers ignore births to citizens with illegal or tps fathers. The numbers are undoubtedly higher.

  2. Mojeaux

    Taurus: Knight of Cups – Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement.

    58 on Tuesday. Still feel like I’m 20 and stupid, still shocked at what I see in the mirror. Whattaya mean I look my age????

    • Toxteth O'Grady

      Happy birthday! 🎂 I bet you look great due to your clean living.

      • Mojeaux

        *side-eyes the bday cake*

        No. No, I do not and no I do not live cleanly.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        (🧁)

      • Gustave Lytton

        At least it’s a cake and not funeral potatoes!

        (Happy birthday!)

    • Evan from Evansville

      Well, I’ll be a full score younger than you on Tues, but I’ll only be 19 younger than you exactly a week later! Much like Colin’s only five years older than me for six weeks until June 8 rolls ’round, when he’s back to six steps above me 🙂

      • Gustave Lytton

        Dammit, an evan is supposed to be a measure of youth.

      • DEG

        Dammit, an evan is supposed to be a measure of youth.

        We’ll always have the memories.

        And Lou Reed.

  3. DenverJ

    Last week was so nice. I wore shorts. I just l ookedoutside and it was snowing! Not much, and the sun is out, but still. I need a nice weekend day to clean out my work vehicle. It’s getting harder and harder to find tools. I need to completely empty it and start from zero.

  4. EvilSheldon

    Cancer: 4 of Coins – The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance.

    Dad and I just laser-engraved all my match magazines with my initials, and printed a new AR-15 chamber flag on his Bambu H2S. It fits.

  5. The Late P Brooks

    Another one bites the dust

    “Liberal arts I think used to be a real draw, but I think that is no longer the case,” says Dr. Breneman. “Education for its own sake at $80,000 a year is a hard sell.”

    ——-

    Liberal arts schools, which focus on teaching softer skills like critical thinking, have faced pressure to provide more profession-specific training, says Mary Churchill, an associate dean at Boston University who has studied college mergers.

    ——-

    Some observers say that a liberal arts education is valuable for creating a more well-rounded, civically minded population.

    “The role that liberal arts institutions play in educating people for a better future for our country, I think, is crucial,” Dr. Churchill says.

    Sure, Socrates.

    • Mojeaux

      Liberal arts degrees are not the problem. I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.

      Gender studies, race studies, and other uber-niche and utterly useless areas of study are the problem. No, really, Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose is the problem.

      The title received criticism from those who were wilfully misrepresenting the nature of the research. “Smells are racist,” became a misguided refrain. One user commented that it was a study of “why it’s racist and/or classist to not like it when people exhibit body odors consistent with poor hygiene”.

      My thesis studies how certain authors of the past century used smell in literature to indicate social hostilities, such as prejudice and exploitation. It also connects this to our real-world understanding of the role the sense plays in society.

      For instance, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), George Orwell states that “the real secret of class distinctions in the West” can be summed up in four frightful words: “The lower classes smell.” Orwell proceeds to unpick the harm that this kind of messaging causes and how we might combat it.

      No, lady. That doesn’t make it better.

      • kinnath

        Technically, I have a liberal arts degrees. I have a BA, not a BS. It didn’t stop me from becoming an engineer. Although, it didn’t help either.

      • Mojeaux

        I grew up being told they were useless, but I didn’t really know what it WAS. I had a Twitter friend who told me the course of discipline, and changed my mind.

      • UnCivilServant

        When we remembered there was a college of liberal arts at RIT, we would joke about “Who goes to a Technical Institute for Liberal Arts?” Then we’d forget about it.

        We made more jokes about the Packaging Science majors. They got the last laugh.

        *stuggles with impossible to open retail packaging*

      • rhywun

        how we might combat it

        Wash? Don’t be low-class? &c

      • rhywun

        I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.

        #metoo

        The problem these days is there are way too many schools and all of them are teaching activism more than anything else. And all taking tax dollars to enrich themselves.

      • UnCivilServant

        @Rhy – That’s what drove me to embrace autodidactism. If the so-called educators won’t educate, I have no use for them.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        I studied English at one of the best engineering schools in the country.

        But, I was a townie and faculty brat, so it was my default, when I really should have left town.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        Hey, underwater basket-weaving is a rec class!

        https://www.uwbw.org (Can’t find a video)

    • EvilSheldon

      True, but there’s an additional problem in that Liberal Arts still pretends to teach critical thinking.

      I was always fond of Camilla Pagila’s opinion that the best major for a truly broad-based liberal arts education is Archaeology.

      • kinnath

        Forty year ago, I think there was still an expectation that liberal arts was intended to teach you how to think and to be curious about the whole world.

        Modernly, it is clear that you are expected to accept the “truth” that you are given and to propagate it without blinking.

      • Mojeaux

        I had a History 100-something class when I was trying to get back into the swing of academia. Ancient societies. She said this curriculum was new and an experiment and we were going to use primary sources to infer/interpret what the history was.

        Dumbest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. You’re 20 and you can barely spell your name at that point. You’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in high school about ancient history. You’re looking at fertility goddess statues and cave paintings and the Parthenon and supposed to figure out what was going on.

        Critical thinking relies on the past, what you’ve experienced, what you’ve already been taught. I remember my dad trying to get me to conclusions I had no frame of educational or experiential reference for and failing and him getting mad at me for not being able to think. I’m 17 and he wants me to figure out case law from a vague definition of “tort.” Who does this?

        I can’t say I was much better when I told my kid to clean the kitchen and she asked WTF and I said, make it look like no one was ever here. I thought that was a clear instruction. It was not.

        My gas station job, my first day, my manager takes me into the cooler and very carefully explains how to stock it. I’m standing there thinking, “Why is he explaining this to me? It’s very clear what needs to happen here.” Fast forward a bunch of years and I marry a convenience store manager who comes home frustrated that he had to explain to a n00b how to stock the cooler. THREE TIMES. Excuse me, what? This is something you DO have to explain????

        Blew my mind.

      • kinnath

        I can say that new grads coming out with technical degrees have limited ability to think creatively and to apply to the real world whatever the fuck was actually crammed into their brains at school.

        I don’t see technical schools as putting out well-rounded people with the skills to work a 9 to 5 job with lots of other people.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        The best thing to teach you how to work a job and not be a fuckup, is to actually work a job and learn not to fuck up.

        In other words, start working part time in high school.

        As far as liberal arts schools go, they are living on borrowed time and another mans memories, to borrow a phrase. They no longer teach real critical thinking, but, rather, critical theory, another branch of post-modern philosophy.

      • Mojeaux

        As long as the financing of useless degrees continues unabated, nothing is on borrowed time.

      • DEG

        Forty year ago, I think there was still an expectation that liberal arts was intended to teach you how to think and to be curious about the whole world.

        Modernly, it is clear that you are expected to accept the “truth” that you are given and to propagate it without blinking.

        Things were transitioning when I was an undergrad thirty years ago.

      • DEG

        In other words, start working part time in high school.

        Or earlier.

  6. The Late P Brooks

    Liberal arts degrees are not the problem. I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.

    That’s what I did. Broad liberal arts: history, political science, modern American literature, even a little bit of logic. Did I monetize it? Not really. I don’t regret it.

    As for “critical thinking” fifty years ago when they said “how to think, not what to think” people weren’t so tempted to laugh out loud.

  7. The Late P Brooks

    Talking point, dead ahead!

    In the last couple of years, a growing number of women and people of color have begun training with Mr. Mills. His clients are conservatives, moderates, liberals, and those who defy simple labels altogether. His star student is Eva, a former infantry soldier who appears at the range in pink stockings and painted nails.

    In some ways, Mr. Mills’ expansive view of gun ownership is still unusual in a firearm culture often associated with support for President Donald Trump and his villainization of Democrats and progressive politics. Yet those who see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as a bulwark against oppressive government are beginning to include liberals who increasingly find themselves in political – and social – crosshairs.

    How else will they manage to survive the Trump/MAGA Reign of Terror? The next battle of Lexington and Concord will be fought under the Rainbow Double Plus flag.

    • Gustave Lytton

      Other than gun grabbers and criminals, pretty sure “gun culture” is firmly that everyone has a right to own as many firearms as their budget allows.

      • Gustave Lytton

        And if you want to learn to shot and operate a firearm safely and hone your skills, pretty much everyone will say welcome. May roll some eyes if you want to defend your family from Gilead. Or endure some cracks about gun grabbers and Murica hating commies.

  8. Evan from Evansville

    “Taurus: Knight of Cups – Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement.”
    ==
    This is rather timely. Contract starts tomorrow morning: “Missouri Grade Level Assessments – Grade 8 Writing.” Well. Last time it was 4th graders. So the new kids’ content ‘should’ be longer than before, but who knows how that’ll affect our team’s timing. (Longer, more weeks, is better.) Went to Meijer to get a day/week, but Sched Lady wasn’t there when I popped in. She will be later so I can get on that before the Cubs go for the sweep over the Mets.

    My office nook is mostly set up. In a cute reality, my post-it reminders from two years ago are still stuck on the angled wall within the ex-closet. and hopefully they won’t need much change for the older kids this ‘term.’ Finding benefit from misapprehension, that Windows com I bought outta desperation a few months back has new purpose as my official Work Computer. (It’s now running as a second screen to run QI eps Richard was gracious enough to send me. Much, endless thanks, Richard.)

    Even though I should be working 6 days/wk, this’ll be the closest to ‘normal’ scheduling I’ve had in two years. Even that was a blip after running the Peru Tribune, and before that, teaching five short afternoons plus four morning shifts per week during my last contract in Korea.

    Got a sub coming out Tues about the gas station lottery, and a Big Idea about bday next week is coming together with my brother. I’ve gone through all my info and put all my travels in chronological order to make a big interactive map. Hopefully, it shows all my flights, when/where, and you’ll be able to click ‘bolded’ ones to reveal some Highlight Pics I’ve assembled for that location.

    Pretty much, I want it to look like the maps Spielberg used in Indiana Jones that show the audience where Indy’s going across the world. I hit a dark tunnel last year when I thought I’d lost all my pics from my decade+ abroad, but I thankfully rediscovered ’em. I’d like my nephews to have a better idea of what I was up to for so long and why I was away. Kinda like Dad having his 76yo ‘Legacy’ thoughts, he’s determined to get The Boys to the airport (w Bro and SiL) so he can see them, passports in hand, get on their first flight out of America to England /Paris.

    Well. (Not to be forgotten,) Dad’ll get a kick out of it/maybe kinda fully realize just where and how *I* explored the world. And even those who don’t love Radiohead’s first seven albums will still kinda have to see how perfect a moment and song is; Everything In Its Right Place .
    (That may have worked. Regardless, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUnXxh5U25Y .)

  9. Tres Cool

    Jugsy and I are, according to her, done. Finished, even.

    For the sake of convenience and the fact that Im gone most of the week, cohabiting will continue for some time at the Palatial 2X-wide™. However, quite honestly, I’m a mess.

    Your silly stars didnt see that coming.

    • Beau Knott

      Sorry. That’s a tough stretch of road.

    • Toxteth O'Grady

      I’m so sorry. I’m not quite caught up, but it seems like a lot of Glibs are having a hard time lately.

      (MikeS, if you’re around: my apologies for being rude on Easter.)

  10. Sean

    “ Monday might be a bit annoying and smelly”

    Whelp, I know what not to do on Monday.

  11. DEG

    Good, fair woman; honest, devoted woman, loving intelligence, gift of vision, success, happiness, pleasure, wisdom, virtue; a perfect spouse and a good mother.

    Not sufficiently shitty.

  12. Sean

    Why are the Aero Precision 30mm mounts on intergalactic back order?

  13. Sean

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2222042/

    I watched this earlier today. Manages to cover most of the typical tropes of the genre, while still being fun.

    And frankly, I’m a sucker for anything with Michael Rooker.

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