Olga Oksman wrote about where fortune cookie fortunes come from:

• The companies that make fortune cookies have massive databases with tens of thousands of fortunes that are randomly selected and printed.
• They continuously seek to expand this database by paying high schoolers and failed writers to come up with more.
• One company pays about 75 cents a fortune and requires at least 700 of them.
• The fortunes have to be bland because each of the 3 billion cookies that are consumed need to have a fortune that could apply to anybody.
• The lucky numbers that show up on fortunes are computer generated.
• People put a lot of faith in the cookies – 110 people won the Powerball in 2005 because they all played the numbers they got in their fortune cookies.

Read more here.

Source: The Guardian

Not J.K. Rowling. Or John Grisham. Or E.L. James. No, the most widely read author is arguably the person who writes all the fortunes for fortune cookies:

• Donald Lau wrote the fortunes for Wonton Food – which claims that it is the largest manufacturer of fortune cookies – for over 30 years.
• He used to write 100 a year but started suffering from writer’s block. This is a problem because fans of the cookie frequently complain about finding repeat fortunes.
• The fortunes that Lau wrote went through a committee vetting process to make sure they would appeal to the widest possible audience.
• The consequences of a fortune that isn’t fully thought through can be dire. One man set for a business trip got a fortune saying he’d find romance on his next trip. His wife divorced him and blamed the fortune cookie.

Read more on CBC. Read our previous coverage on fortune cookies here.

The writers at Cracked compiled a list of companies that dominate eccentric product categories:

• The striped white blankets that most American babies are swaddled in soon after they’re born at a hospital, are all made by an Illinois company.
• Since the 1850s a single shoemaker has made the shoes worn by American Presidents. For Obama they re-issued the shoes worn by Abraham Lincoln.
• A business in Queens, New York, makes 4 million fortune cookies a day – singlehandedly supplying most of America’s fortune cookie market.
• A Rhode Island Company has cornered the market on making “Body of Christ Wafers” for churches.
• The religious food-maker’s wares are appreciated because the holy wafers don’t create crumbs, which would inevitably end up on the Church floor, and ignominiously be swept away.
• The company is responsive to shifts in market demands, and is exploring the creation of a gluten-free version of the wafer.

Read the full list, replete with some clever jokes, on Cracked.

The always excellent Cracked wrote about misidentified national symbols:

• Fortune cookies are actually Japanese. However after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during WW2, Americans were loath to eat in Japanese restaurants. Chinese entrepreneurs stepped into the breach by offering politically acceptable Asian food – and that had to include fortune cookies.
• Bagpipes were Roman. Ceasar is thought to have marched on Britain with a group of Bagpipers in tow, scaring what would become the Scots. The Scots were so impressed by the instruments that they adopted them for their own.
• Russian nesting dolls. Those dolls you see where progressively smaller versions of the same doll are nested within each other? They’re Japanese, although the Japanese version depicted an old bald man and had so many figurines that the final one was as small as a grain of rice. Russian artists took the concept, slapped a woman onto them, and sold them as their own.

The full list shows why Budweiser isn’t really American and why Pinatas are Chinese (or, at a stretch, Italian). It’s a funny read. Find it here.

Source: Cracked