Today's Stichomancy for Shaquille O'Neal

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov:

"Why so? Your friends don't know a nything of science or medicine, but you don't reproach them with it. Every one has his own line. I don't understand landscapes and operas, but the way I look at it is that if one set of sensible people devote their whole lives to them, and other sensible people pay immense sums for them, they must be of use. I don't understand them, but not understanding does not imply disbelieving in them."

"Let me shake your honest hand!"

After dinner Olga Ivanovna would drive off to see her friends, then to a theatre or to a concert, and she returned home after midnight. So it was every day.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde:

So still that one might hear the bat's small wing Wander and wheel above the pines, or tell Each tiny dew-drop dripping from the bluebell's brimming cell.

And far away across the lengthening wold, Across the willowy flats and thickets brown, Magdalen's tall tower tipped with tremulous gold Marks the long High Street of the little town, And warns me to return; I must not wait, Hark ! 't is the curfew booming from the bell at Christ Church gate.

Poem: Impression Du Matin

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner:

The stranger still sat motionless, looking into the fire.

Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. "Well, I came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a nigger man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a word to a nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as cool as can be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked her to give him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn't think anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging about the camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and asked me for a lot of cartridges. She'd never asked me for anything before. I asked her

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 Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

There is no David Innes.

There is no Dian the Beautiful.

There is no world within a world.

Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination--noth- ing more.

BUT--

The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph instrument upon the lonely Sahara is little short of uncanny, in view of your story of the adventures of David Innes.

I have called it one of the most remarkable coinci-

Pellucidar