Are fortune cookies the real deal? They are for one North Carolina man, and you'll never convince him otherwise. After dining at a local Chinese restaurant, he stopped at a convenience store on the way home, where for no particular reason he bought a lottery ticket, and just for grins used the numbers from his after-dinner fortune cookie.
The next day he got an email, stating that he had a winning Mega Millions ticket. When he showed it to his wife, they came up with two separate conclusions. A) it was a prank from a friend, or B) an internet scam, but neither of those panned out, because the email was legit, and he had a verified $1,000,000 ticket. Not only that, but he had spent an extra $1 on a Megaplier, so his ticket in actuality got boosted to a total of $4,000,000.
A rare occurrence? To be sure, and by far the largest ever based on a fortune cookie bet. In 2014 a New York woman did hit for $2,000,000, and there have been others that hit in the $100,000 range, but $4,000,000 was without a doubt the top of the fortune cookie heap.
As a side note, I had always thought that fortune cookies came from China, since I've never gotten any except in a Chinese restaurant, but apparently the cookie itself is of Japanese origin, where they have been making the crunchy folded confection for hundreds of years in Kyoto. Even more surprisingly, the idea of having a fortune inside the cookie might be an American thing, dating from sometime in the early 1900's.
Stranger still, there seems to be a bonfide fortune cookie rule. You of course must not tell anyone what the fortune cookie said, or else the fortune won't come true [so much for passing them around the table comparing our fortunes amongst ourselves] and you must burn the tiny paper strip after you read it. If, however, you happen to get a cookie with no fortune inside, then good things will come to you in the future, because the cookie owes you one.
Going forward, my fortune cookies are going to get a little more respect.
#chinese #fortune #cookies
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