The fortune cookie that came with lunch today read "You are going to take a trip to the seaside." and followed it up with a little smiley face.
The slightly unnerving thing is that I bought a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles yesterday.
I suppose it could have been worse. A few months ago, I got a fortune cookie that read "A reunion with an old acquaintance is a disaster." That would not have been a good thing.
Rather an odd fortune, considering that fortune cookie companies accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
Of course, fortune cookies aren't Chinese at all. They were invented in 1915 by a Japanese-American named Makoto Hagiwara, who lived inside the Japanese Tea pavilion in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. A few years later in Los Angeles, a Chinese-American baker named David Jung started making fortune cookies. This was apparently an independent invention, much the same way that Newton and Leibniz invented calculus separately, or how Darwin and Wallace developed the theory of natural selection independently of each other. Perhaps there was something in that California water 85 years ago...