Today's Stichomancy for Britney Spears

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White:

miles up and down a mountain fourteen thousand feet high. The last three thousand feet were nearly straight up and down. We finished at a four-mile clip an hour before sunset, and discussed what to do next to fill in the time. When we sat down, we found we had had about enough; but we had not discovered it before.

All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt the benefit of the change from the lower country. Here we were definitely in the Mountains. Our plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac:

she added; "but naval men must be excused; they know nothing of law." ("Come, we had better make peace," thought she; "we sha'n't gain anything by battling in this way.")

A slight smile wandered over the priests face and was lost in its wrinkles.

"He has done us the service of getting a proper estimate on the value of those paintings," he said, looking up at the pictures. "They will be a noble ornament to the chapel of the Virgin." ("You shot a sarcasm at me," thought he, "and there's another in return; we are quits, madame.")

"If you intend to give them to Saint-Gatien, allow me to offer frames

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

she had anything in common with Philip,--and there was a certain element of ingenuous unconsciousness in which they were not so far unlike,--it only placed them in the more complete antagonism. Perhaps if two beings were in absolutely no respect alike, they never could meet even for purposes of hostility; there must be some common ground from which the aversion may proceed. Moreover, in this case Aunt Jane utterly disbelieved in Malbone because she had reason to disbelieve in his father, and the better she knew the son the more she disliked the father retrospectively.

Philip was apt to be very heedless of such aversions,--indeed,

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 The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair:

like Nietzsche; let him stand upon a pillar and be devoured by worms like Simeon Stylites--on these terms I grant to any dreamer the right to hold himself above economic science.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers