Humorous Interludes by Ron Yarosh

Good news everybody.

I recently entered a contest. I won 1^st Prize.

All I had to do was list twenty-five uses for a fortune cookie. The Wing Fat Fortune Cookie Company, LTD, located in in How-Wee-Lie Provence, China hosted it.

A while back, I happened to be reading a magazine called, “Soldier of Fortune Cookie”, when I noticed the contest. At the time, I was sitting in the waiting room of my Acupuncturist, Dr. Pierce Mee Shin.

A few weeks later, I got a letter from, General Tso What, President of the cookie company. He said that my suggestions were unique and award winning. I guess it was a good idea to write my entry on a brown, wrinkled paper bag with a grease stain on it. I used a red crayon and wrote the following:

1. Use them as earrings (pierced or clip on).
2. Give them as Anniversary gifts for a couple’s thirteenth anniversary, which (believe it or not) is the Fortune Cookie anniversary.
3. Throw them at unruly squirrels wherever you find them.
4. Hand them out to random people you encounter while walking past them on a tightrope.
5. Chain them together for ornamentation on a Christmas tree, or other holiday tree or shrubbery.
6. Use then as earplugs for rock concerts.
7. Sit on them to hatch out baby fortune cookies. This takes seventeen days. The babies are the cutest things you’ll ever see.
8. Open a food truck featuring only “hashish filled” fortune cookies.
9. Stuff a dozen or more in your mouth to make yourself look chipmunk like.
10. Paint them in happy colors or carve them into whimsical figures to celebrate National Fortune Cookie Day held on the second Thursday of the first week in August.
11. Hand them out as treats on Halloween night.
12. Set them on fire and juggle them.
13. Make an edible suit out of them.
14. Drop them on the ground when walking in the woods so you can find your way back to your rickshaw.
15. Open a fortune cookie psychic business.
16. Use them as fishing bait. I once caught a three thousand pound marlin off the Florida coast on a fortune cookie using a lo mein noodle as a fishing line and a plastic toothpick as a hook. It took me twelve days to reel it in. I existed on fortune cookies and hot tea as I hauled it toward the Chinese Junk boat I had rented. My photo appeared in the Chinese newspaper, “Junk News”.
17. Create a foundation to adopt homeless fortune cookies.
18. Make a fortune cookie quilt for those cold wintery nights when you’re alone, with just a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream to keep you company.
19. Use them for a pizza topping. They’re crunchy and delicious.
20. Pave your driveway with them. They’re practically indestructible.
21. Throw them at a newly wed couple for good fortune.
22. Plant them in a garden for good luck. It takes three to four months for sprouts to appear.
23. Paint them green, and use them as bait to trap leprechauns. I actually found a pot of gold that way, but the crafty leprechaun stole it and ran off with it.
24. Make a fortune cookie filled piñata. Hit it with a large chopstick.
25. Turn them into an age defying cream and make a fortune with that.

The first prize was a lifetime supply of fortune cookies. I got my first box a few months ago. Then I began to wonder. How will they know when to stop sending them to me? Do they know when I’ll die? How could they possibly know that?

Then it hit me. Of course! They must have found the date of my death inside a fortune cookie.

I’ve been calling the company and writing them to find out that important date. They don’t return my calls, and all the letters I’ve sent have been retuned stamped, “No such address”, written in Mandarin Chinese.

Well, here I am stuck with hundreds of those cellophane wrapped delights. Looking back on it, I never should have sent in that entry form.

Instead, I should have sent in a twenty five-word essay on, “How to be a cool, fire eater”. The first prize for that contest was more practical. They will send a fire-eater to every one of your future, charcoal, barbeque parties to get the coals burning properly.

Anyway, I decided to open the cookies now and share the fortunes with you, my dear friends and followers of this blog. I hope you find them to your liking.

Sorry, but I can’t send you the cookies. Federal laws prohibit such action. Besides, I’m saving the them to make a new roof for my humble dwelling.

Oh, if you can think of any other useful things to do with a fortune cookie, feel free to put them in the comments section. Who knows, there may be another contest in the future.

Thank you my friends, and good luck in your futures.

Here’s the first fortune I found. It says, “For peace, harmony, and tranquility follow the lychee nut.”

© 2014 Ronald J. Yarosh

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