Editor's Notes column

Here's what's running in Saturday's Tracy Press:

Seeing stars again

The Voice pages are packed during election season, and bringing up a topic not related to the races is asking for trouble right now.

But this is nothing compared to what happened when I thought the newspaper could exist without its daily horoscope.

The women who answer our phones at the Tracy Press have now tallied 50 calls of complaint — sometimes howling diatribes — about the disappearance of the daily prediction of events. Several weeks ago, in an effort to gain space for news stories, we dropped one comics page, which had been home to the signs of the zodiac. We moved some puzzles to the first pages of classifieds and added a weekly horoscope.

Who knew that a daily dose of astrology is more important to some readers than the police blotter or the obituaries or — imagine this — the latest developer agreement in town? Not me.

One woman, a Capricorn, explained that her daily habit is really a necessity. When she read her weekly horoscope in the Tracy Press this week, it left her defeated. It said, “News you will receive hits you very hard, Capricorn. But there is nothing you can do to change the situation, so you just have to work through it.”

Now she has to wait a week before she gets another message, when she’d really like some advice for how to get through the next few days of — something bad.

Then there was the woman who stopped in our office after West High’s homecoming parade Friday to ask if there was a chance the horoscope would be in today’s paper. The last one she’d read had said her relationship would fizzle — and it did — and now she wants to know what’s coming next.

For Cindy, whose last name will go unmentioned because she reads the paper when she’s supposed to be working for one of the largest employers in town, the horoscope is her morning ritual.

“We just have a nice little chitchat about our horoscopes in our department before we start our day,” she writes, using her work e-mail. “It wakes us up, and we move on.”

One of the women in her office says she knows how to deal with her husband after she reads her horoscope. Another says she just likes to be entertained.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but by the end of October in an election year, politics ceases to be entertaining to me. I’m tired of the TV ads, the mailbox junk, the survey calls and the computerized messages left on my answering machine.

I could really use a horoscope to read today. Here’s what I’m imagining I’ll find: “You could make at least 50 readers happy today.”

So here you go. If you really want to know what’s happening, skip over the news and go directly to Page 35.

• Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).