Today's Stichomancy for Ricky Martin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad:

about? They were sitting on deck right aft, round an open case, eating bread and cheese and drinking bottled stout.

"On the background of flames twisting in fierce tongues above their heads they seemed at home like salamanders, and looked like a band of desperate pirates. The fire sparkled in the whites of their eyes, gleamed on patches of white skin seen through the torn shirts. Each had the marks as of a battle about him--bandaged heads, tied-up arms, a strip of dirty rag round a knee--and each man had a bottle between his legs and a chunk of

Youth

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll:

It is not like you.

He either fears his fate too much, Or his desert is small, Who dares not put it to the touch, To win or lose it all."

"I dare not ask the question whether there is another!" he said passionately. "It would break my heart to know it!"

"Yet is it wise to leave it unasked? You must not waste your life upon an 'if'!"

"I tell you I dare not!', "May I find it out for you?" I asked, with the freedom of an old friend.

Sylvie and Bruno

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu:

To shield the truth and smite the wrong, To honour Virtue, Valour, Worth. To cherish faith and foster song. So may the lustre of your days Outshine the deeds Firdusi sung, Your name within a nation's prayer, Your music on a nation's tongue.

LEILI

The serpents are asleep among the poppies, The fireflies light the soundless panther's way To tangled paths where shy gazelles are straying,

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 A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw:

superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.

Government by Bullies

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine