Today's Stichomancy for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare:

I might as yet have been a spreading flower, Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied Love to myself, and to no love beside.

'But woe is me! too early I attended A youthful suit (it was to gain my grace) Of one by nature's outwards so commended, That maiden's eyes stuck over all his face: Love lack'd a dwelling and made him her place; And when in his fair parts she did abide, She was new lodg'd and newly deified.

'His browny locks did hang in crooked curls;

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey:

would be able to stop me, get the girl, and make for his mountain haunts. If Mercedes is really watched--if her identity is known, which I am sure is the case--we couldn't get far from this house before I'd be knifed and she seized."

"Good Heavens! Thorne, can that sort of thing happen less than a stone's throw from the United States line?" asked Gale, incredulously.

"It can happen, and don't you forget it. You don't seem to realize the power these guerrilla leaders, these rebel captains, and particularly these bandits, exercise over the mass of Mexicans. A bandit is a man of honor in Mexico. He is feared, envied, loved. In the hearts of the people he stands next to the national idol--the

Desert Gold

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton:

of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the door of communication with the next room. He hated the door most of all...

At the outset, he had felt no special sense of responsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck the right note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it. The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale of the usual. It was not like anything that had ever happened to him before, or in which he had ever pictured

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus:

Deliberation is a motion towards enquiry about actions possible to us; a man deliberateth whether he ought to pursue an object or no. Then he judgeth which is the better, and so ariseth judgement. Then he is inclined towards it, and loveth that which was so judged by the deliberative faculty, and this is called resolve; for, if he judge a thing, and yet be not inclined toward the thing that he hath judged, and love it not, it is not called resolve. Then, after inclination toward it, there ariseth choice or rather selection. For choice is to choose one or other of two things in view, and to select this rather than that. And it is manifest that choice is deliberation plus discrimination, and