With a bowl of fortune cookies on the front desk at work and desperate to know about the future I took a "sample" of cookies from the bowl, and got no fortune. No fortune. All aphorisms.
There's at least one Asian food manufacturer/distributor in the Twin Cities whose cookies never have any fortunes, they just have aphorisms. Aphorisms like this:
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Tomorrow may bee too late. Live, think, and act for today.
If you're not rejected at least three times a week, you're not trying hard enough.
It's no good. They're meant to be F-O-R-T-U-N-E cookies, not pithy saying cookies. At best these aphorism cookies tell you a method by which something might happen in the future. At worst -- like the one about mediocre people above -- they summarize historical regularities and stereotypes; nothing about the future. A fortune is a projection into the unknown future, whereas an aphorism is a coarse generalization about past life.
Don't they know white people buy Asian food for the dinner-concluding escapism? Aphorism cookies would be best suited to some hard scrabble diner or grill where all the patrons have been tutored at the school of hard knocks.
Posted by robe0419 at October 12, 2004 3:16 PM