{"id":367,"date":"2005-02-09T19:06:06","date_gmt":"2005-02-10T06:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=367"},"modified":"2008-02-16T14:10:15","modified_gmt":"2008-02-17T01:10:15","slug":"360-fortune-cookie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=367","title":{"rendered":"#360 :: Fortune Cookie"},"content":{"rendered":"

order<\/a> physician<\/a> ‘popup’, here<\/a> dosage<\/a> ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”><\/a>Wind the key, and it goes – a self-locomoting toy, the culmination of myriad simple technologies in a complex, palm-sized plaything: Wheels – once just logs used to move other logs, now advanced to trim wheel\/hub\/axle design. Tin lithography – the semblance of color, depth and detail printed in Benday dots<\/a> on machine-cut, rust-prone sheet metal that’s folded and slotted together, tab A to slot B and so on, until it takes shape as a bus. Clockwork – spring-driven cogs and gears store energy pumped in by a few revolutions of the key, then convert it to be pumped out as hundreds of revolutions of the axles. It makes a clicking sound when being wound, a ratcheting sizzle when released to glide across the kitchen floor, invisible passengers hidden behind painted windows – tiny avatars to your rapid transit fantasies. The “Blue Giant” is made in China.
\ncost<\/a> ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”><\/a>A brain tremor emerges from childhood, a submerged snag in the deep, slow-flowing river of memory: I was probably three or four when I put my forefinger and thumb together, tight, pinching nothing and imagining a whale<\/em> in there, its full tonnage trapped between my fingerprints. It was a huge concept for a kid – tiny density, microscopic mass – and to this day I don’t know where it came from, but I would revisit it every now and then with a sort of breathy little “whoa.”<\/p>\n

As I grew, the sensation recurred in odd places: On the job as a reporter: A treeful of egrets, looking delicate as tapers in a cathedral candelabra, perched in the path of a 400,000-gallon oil spill on the Delaware River that was headed their way from the breached hull of a tanker run aground upstream. In pop culture: Frank Miller’s Miho<\/a>, the tiny, ruthlessly lethal street-waif\/assassin who fends off the entire Mafia on tiptoe and sword-point. In nature: swollen, phallic stalactites hanging impossibly in the gaping maw of Carlsbad Caverns<\/a>, tapering to a point the width of a molecule that grows with near-infinite slowness, a single drop of mineral-laden water at a time – and the huge colony of bats<\/a> that swarm up out of the cave at night like a seething, black tornado from which they peel off at the top – single file – to hunt for food at sunset.<\/p>\n

So it is with this thing. The fortune cookie is a confection of frothy whimsy and deep portent, of crunchiness and clairvoyance. It’s jsut a snack, a crisp trifle. It’s also your fate<\/em>. You know it’s mass-produced, you can never tell whether you’re going to get a real future-predicting fortune or some worthless aphorism like “It is better to be wise than to be rich.” But it’s your fortune<\/em>, a tiny oracle to be heeded with some reverence or at least a snicker, as you munch the vessel in which it arrived to stop ever so briefly your headlong rush through life and make you think: Is this true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A brain tremor emerges from childhood, a submerged snag in the deep, slow-flowing river of memory: I was probably three or four when I put my forefinger and thumb together, tight, pinching nothing and imagining a whale in there, its full tonnage trapped between my fingerprints. It was a huge concept for a kid – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edible","category-symbol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}