(Originally posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2011)
/usr/bin/fortune -m 'change' |grep -C 1 'effects'
It seems appropriate to launch my new weblog with this image of a dog-eared fortune cookie epigram, which I captured with my iPhone on December 27, 2010.1
I find this fortune fascinating. The typical messages found in these crisp origami sugar envelopes tend to fall into two categories. Most seem deliberately crafted to elicit cheap laughs after adding “… in bed” to the end of the phrase, while others baffle the reader with their impenetrable opacity (i.e., “The best sauce is a good applesauce.”2)
This example, on the other hand, seems appropriately oracular. “The change you started already have (sic) far-reaching effects. Be ready.”
Coincidentally, my life has changed quite drastically in the past year, and the changes already do have far-reaching effects.
I guess that means it’s time to get ready.
1 Perceptive readers may wonder whether this photographic evidence of a recent Chinese take-out meal just a few days after Christmas reveals anything about my ethnicity or spirituality. Well, no … I’m not Jewish, but I have spent enough years wandering in the desert with Abraham’s descendants to share some of their cultural traditions.
2 “The Best Sauce is a Good Apple Sauce” happens not only to be an excellent example of an inscrutably cryptic fortune found in a cookie (this one at a Mexican restaurant) but also of the Oulipian writing game “Substantive +7”, and (not coincidentally) also a song written by Shawn Wallace and recorded by The Panic Band which you may access here, free of charge, for your listening pleasure. Thereby hangs a tale — a brief tale, to be sure, but nonetheless too long for a footnote. Still, I may share the details with you one day, if you promise to be very good.
