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 Koran:

Have they not seen that we have made a safe sanctuary whilst people are being snatched away around them? is it then in falsehood that they will believe, and for the favours of God be ungrateful?

But who is more unjust than he who devises against God a lie, or calls the truth a lie when it comes to him? Is there not in hell a resort for the misbelievers? but those who fight strenuously for us we will surely guide them into our way, for, verily, God is with those who do well.

THE CHAPTER OF THE GREEKS

(XXX. Mecca.)

IN the name of the merciful and compassionate God.

The Koran

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare:

And can do nought but wail her darling's loss, Even so myself bewails good Gloster's case With sad unhelpful tears, and with dimm'd eyes Look after him, and cannot do him good, So mighty are his vowed enemies. His fortunes I will weep and 'twixt each groan Say 'Who's a traitor? Gloster he is none.'

[Exeunt all but Queen, Cardinal Beaufort, Suffolk and York; Somerset remains apart.]

QUEEN. Free lords, cold snow melts with the sun's hot beams.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift:

An instrument to earthly love? Know'st thou not yet that men commence Thy votaries, for want of sense? Nor shall Vanessa be the theme To manage thy abortive scheme; She'll prove the greatest of thy foes, And yet I scorn to interpose, But using neither skill nor force, Leave all things to their natural course." The goddess thus pronounced her doom, When, lo, Vanessa in her bloom,

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 Falk by Joseph Conrad:

sooth, he had caught sight of Hermann's niece on the poop. And so did I; and probably as soon as he had seen her himself. I saw the modest, sleek glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering curves--a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. And Diana the ship sat, high-walled and as solid as an institution, on the smooth level of the water, the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon the seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support

Falk