Fortune Favors the Prepared, Part Two
January 18th, 2008(Last week I wrote about general trends in fortune cookies, and the fortunes they contained. You don’t necessarily need to have read that post to understand this one, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the content more if you have.)
This week’s post is the second part in a two-part series I’m doing about fortune cookies. This time around, I’ll be discussing the specifics of the fortunes I read.
As I said before, fortunes come in 3 basic flavors: Compliments, Advice, and Predictions (though there were a few weird fortunes that didn’t fit in those categories, or any other from what I could tell.) 96% of the 500 fortunes I read fit into one of those 3 types. But beyond that, the question is: were there any other interesting details I noticed about specific fortunes themselves?
The first thing I picked out is that every manufacturer (and author, for the 200 fortunes I got from books) has their own distinct fortune writing “style”, as you might expect. The batch I got direct from Wonton Foods had very upbeat but mundane fortunes. (”Keep an eye out for someone special.”) Some fortune makers were prediction- and compliment-heavy; others preferred advice. One batch I read even had strident and extreme fortunes in all capital letters, seeming to shout at you at all times. (”YOU WILL STEP ON THE SOIL OF MANY COUNTRIES.”) Those turned out to be my favorite fortunes, actually, consistently giving me a chuckle while reading. Anyway, the upshot is, I’m sure I could dig through those 500 fortunes, pick one out, and easily tell what batch it was from. Fortune writing is less generic than I thought.
Also, some batches were highly repetitive, while others weren’t. The 400-count batch from Wonton Foods, based on what I saw (maybe 120 fortunes at this point) probably had no more than 40-60 total fortunes in it. That took me by surprise. I think fortunes like “This is your day to call the shots” lose something the 8th or 9th time you read them. Even when I shuffled the cookies around a tremendous amount, I kept reading the same fortunes over and over. Most of the other batches, however, repeated themselves much less often, no more than 5-10% of the time.
It’s funny - since I read so many fortunes in a row, I started having an inner monologue about the fortunes and even began commenting out loud in response (especially with the repeat fortunes). I’d read a fortune like “You’re feeling the need to think longer-term. Plan ahead.” and say to myself “Is that so?” Or when I read “Dessert CAN make you happy.” I’d think to myself, “Wow, fortune cookie, does that INCLUDE you?” as I rolled my eyes. It got to be pretty entertaining, I thought. Having an open forum with hundreds of fortunes can give you a unique perspective on yourself.
To give you a little more hard data, here’s a quick summary of my general findings on repeat fortunes:
As you can see, a few fortunes were repeating themselves much more often than others (as many as 7-9 times). That was probably the Wonton Foods batch skewing things. As you’d expect, it was mostly the 300 fortunes I got from actual cookies that repeated themselves. Like I mentioned in my last post, the fortunes in those cookies were typically heavy on advice and predictions, which meant most of the repeats were in one of those two categories. (It’s too bad there weren’t more compliment fortune repeats. Yes, I derive personal happiness from anonymous and vague messages written by strangers. But hey, so do you by reading my blog - right? RIGHT?)
What I didn’t expect is that every single batch of fortune cookies would repeat themselves at least a few times. Even the books, which were mostly shills for advice via fortunes, each had at least one repeat! And despite my limited sampling from each vendor (only 12 in the case of the dark chocolate fortune cookies), I always found one or more repeated fortunes. I don’t really have an explanation for this, other than maybe laziness on the part of the fortune writer (or maybe it made them easier to manufacture).
For example, Wonton Foods claims to have around 2,500 fortunes “in rotation”, but they were the worst offenders in my test. I could hardly find 50 unique fortunes in a box of 400! The chances of two diners at a four (or six) person table getting the same fortune would be a lot higher than you’d think. If you look at the famous same birthday problem, with 23 people in the same room, there is over a 50% chance they’ll share a birthday. Can you imagine what the probability is when you have 10-20 outcomes instead of 365? It doesn’t take a lot of diners before you start having a good chance of getting repeat fortunes at the same table. That doesn’t seem like an optimal situation.
Nevertheless, my favorite fortune of all was one of the most repeated, “You will stumble into the happiness of your life.” and its close cousin “You will stumble into the path that will lead your life to happiness.” These fortunes succinctly explain the idea of “Black Swans” (”a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations”), an idea I think a lot about these days.
I did have some other favorite fortunes, though. There’s this self-referential fortune: “Fortunes often have multiple meanings - read them deeply.” Which plays into this possibly lewd double-entendre fortune: “He who goes with crabs learns to walk backwards.” (I fail to see how that would help, but I’m not about to find out for this blog post. Despite my preference for testing empirical claims, dear reader, I have to draw the line somewhere.) And the misread or awkwardly phrased fortune: “Be notorious today.” Or the cynical and possibly nonsensical fortune: “To exercise is human, to not is divine.”
The funniest one, though, was the unintentionally anti-fortune cookie fortune: “Many receive advice; few profit by it.” What’s the takeaway there? That people are too stupid to take advice-giving fortune cookies to heart? Or is the advice just bad? It made me laugh though.
By now I’ve probably said about as much as I can manage about this humble dessert. But I’ve barely touched on related oddities like the neon green fortune cookie USB thumbdrive or the upcoming book on the history of Chinese food, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” (which I got from this brand new Washington Post article on fortune cookies). There’s just so much out there to talk about that I could probably fill another couple of posts. But in lieu of that, I’ll go back to “The Oracle”, which you’ll recognize if you read the previous post in this series. It’s a bowl containing the 300+ fortunes I extracted from the fortune cookies I managed to make it through.
And what did The Oracle have to say about this post? “Eat your vegetable and you’ll grow up big and strong like Popeye.” Since I’m vegetarian, I’ll consider that as good a fortune as any. But I’m disturbed by the singular “vegetable”. Just one? Or one type? Which vegetable? I don’t think eating just spinach is going to do it for me. Maybe I’ll go out for Chinese food instead…
(As promised, here is my fortune cookie data. At some point in the future I’ll probably parse all these fortunes out and do a linguistic analysis on them. Feel free to peruse the data in the meantime!)
| | | del.icio.us |
February 29th, 2008 at 2:22 am
[…] what ethnic cuisines are popular in the U.S. and which aren’t. Having recently written a two-part post on fortune cookies, I’ve definitely had ethnic cuisines in […]