today's crossword on yahoo games was disappointingly straightforward. i'd expected it to occupy my time while i was imaging my arrays, but now i find myself idle.

...

while staring at the massive grease spot that a dropped left-over shanghai noodle has imprinted upon my napkin, it occurred to me that it was kind of remarkable that the fortunes in fortune cookies didn't come out greased up and transclucent. i speculated that maybe the cookies didn't really have all that much grease in them -- that they were made entirely of, like, cornstarch and water -- which would explain why they're always flavourless and bone dry.

i consulted the great oracle of google to find this recipe for fortune cookies (which, like chop suey, was an american creation -- from some dude in LA, for crap's sake):

1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 to 2 Tbsp of water

Beat egg slightly. Add sugar and beat until very thick and smooth. Add oil to mixture. Add water and a little of the egg mixture to the cornstarch and stir until smooth; beat into egg mixture. Heat griddle to about 350 degrees. Drop a heaping teaspoonful of batter into the griddle. Then spread with a spoon into a cookie about 3 inches in diameter an d about 1/8 inch thick. Turn over to brown underside. Cook until cookies are light golden in color and lifts easily from the pan. Remove cookies one at a time from the griddle. Place a fortune paper in the center of the cookie and fold the cookie in half, pinching the edges together and folding down.

2 tablespoons of oil! i use that much to bake a batch of a dozen muffins which routinely leave grease spots on their muffin cups, and 1/4 cup cornstarch can't make that many fortune cookies.

anyway, when was it, exactly, when fortune cookies (more aptly called sweeping advice cookies or mangled proverb cookies) started including tacky lottery numbers? i'd venture to guess some time in the last ten years, 'cause i certainly don't remember them from my childhood.

i don't really understand the point, frankly. was there a marketing blitz that changed the landscape of fortune-cookie-dom forever? when one rogue manufacturer started offering new, improved cookies, 'now with lottery numbers!' to chinese and pseudochinese restauranteurs and all of its competitors had to follow suit? isn't not like regular folks regularly go out and buy fortune cookies to snack on.

cookie fortunes aren't meant to be taken seriously, of course -- although (digression) there was an awesome researcher at the national research council in ottawa, margaret, who was otherwise incredibly smart, witty and just plain cool, but had this bizarre superstitious hang-up over fortune cookies -- but it seems including random lottery numbers can only damage the fortune cookie's credibility. what is it saying, really? that you'll win the lottery if you play those numbers? that you'll win something? what about those other chumps you dined with that have different potential lottery picks? are you just supposed to be luckier than they are? it appears to me that the numbers are simply an admission that the whole thing's nothing but a crapshoot.

as you can probably gather, i've never been the biggest fan of fortune cookies or cookie fortunes, although appending 'in bed' to a fortune does do a remarkably impressive amount to boost the fortune's entertainment value and works well on a surprisingly regular basis.

case in point:
about a month ago, we dined at a vietnamese eatery and my sweetie got 'self-reliance is your path to success.'

i wonder who came up with that. you can't really arbitrarily add 'in bed' to anything else and have it both still make sense and be hilarious.

fortunes can, of course, be entertaining in and of themselves -- on occasion. i had a really good one in my wallet for a while, but unfortunately, i don't remember it and the lettering's since rubbed off.

i've gotten 'hell is paved with good intentions,' but my ultimate favourite is a fortune that DA told me about: 'you like chinese food.'

my sweetie still insists that it would be solid gold to start giving out cookies with fortunes reading 'you just ate cat.'

what are some of the better cookie fortunes (real ones!) y'all have encountered?