DONALD LAU (1948–)
Claim to Fame: For more than 30 years, Lau was the CFW (chief fortune writer) at Wonton Foods of Brooklyn, New York, which bakes 4.5 million fortune cookies a day and is the largest fortune cookie baker in the United States. There’s a very good chance that the last fortune cookie you ate was baked in Brooklyn by Wonton Foods.
Blocked! Lau, who is now Wonton Foods’ chief financial officer, was assigned the job of writing fortunes in the early 1980s when the company, originally a noodle maker, bought a small bakery in New York’s Chinatown and expanded into fortune cookies. The bakery’s catalog of fortunes was small and dated to the 1940s; many were old-fashioned and no longer relevant. As Wonton Foods ramped up production, the company realized it didn’t have enough fortunes for all the cookies it planned to bake. Lau says he got the job by default, since he was the one that spoke the best English. Writing three or four new fortunes a day when he wasn’t tending to his other responsibilities, over time he built up a rotating catalog of some 10,000 fortunes. But by 2017, Lau was out of gas. His case of writer’s block proved incurable, so he turned his fortune-writing duties over to James Wong, a nephew of the company’s founder. His advice for Wong and other aspiring fortune writers: “Don’t have too complicated a mind,” he says. “Think in ten-word sentences.”
Figs aren’t vegan—when wasps pollinate them, they get trapped inside the fruit. (By the time…
THE PAPER CHASE
Next time you ball up a piece of stationery and toss it in the trash, consider what the ancient Egyptians went through more than 5,000 years ago just to write a simple letter.
3,000 BC Long before the paper we use today was invented in China, Egyptians from the First Dynasty were using the papyrus plant to make a thick yellow paperlike material that they used for accounting, recording history and sending important messages. The plant’s inner stalk was cut lengthwise into strips, which are laid out next to each other. Water from the Nile was then spread on that layer. More strips were laid crisscross over the first layer and put in a press. Then the sheet was beaten with a mallet, polished with a shell, and rubbed with cedar oil. Ten to twenty sheets would be glued end to end and rolled around a stick to create a scroll. When the process was complete, an Egyptian scribe would write on the papyrus with a reed brush dipped in ink made from charcoal and water.
Papyrus paper was produced all around the Mediterranean in Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Romans used papyrus as late as the third century and had different names for it, depending on the quality. Augustus (named after the first Roman emperor) was the premium quality, while emporitica (packing paper) was a coarser product, used to wrap fish. Rolls of papyrus were made in large quantities in the city of Byblos, Phoenicia, one of the oldest cities in the world. The Greeks took their word for book, biblios, from the city’s name, and that’s where the word bible comes from.
105 AD Cai Lun, a court eunuch for Emperor He of China’s Han Dynasty, was observing wasps build nests by chewing plant fibers and shaping them into a thin paper. He came up with a way of imitating the wasps’ process by suspending felted sheets of fiber made from cotton, rags, and plants in water, and then draining the water, creating a thin matted sheet of paper. Until then, the Chinese had used costly silk or heavy bamboo for writing messages, but from that time on, paper was the stationery of choice for the Chinese…and then the world.
1806 For generations, Henry Fourdrinier’s family had been in the papermaking business in France, as engravers and stationers. In 1806 Henry and his brother, Sealy Fourdrinier, patented the first modern papermaking machine, which made paper in a variety of sizes and in rolls. Their machine became the model for all future papermaking machines.
1844
1857
Joseph Gayetty invented toilet paper.
In 1838 Charles Fenerty was working in his father’s lumber mill in Nova Scotia when he heard that a local paper mill was having trouble finding the rags required for making quality paper. The enterprising 17-year-old began experimenting with making paper out of wood pulp from the mill. Six years later, on October 26, 1844, Fenerty delivered a letter to the top newspaper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Acadian Recorder. The letter said: “The enclosed piece of paper, which is as firm in its texture as white, and…as durable as the common wrapping paper made of cotton, hemp and ordinary materials of manufacture is actually composed of spruce wood.”
1896–1950s Pulped wood paper began to be adopted by paper mills in Canada, the United States, and Europe, using steam-driven papermaking machines. Only problem: conventional paper was so expensive that only the elite were able to afford stationery or books. Charles Fenerty changed that when he invented a process for producing “newsprint” paper and, in doing so, he launched an entire industry: “the pulps”—affordable newspapers, magazines and novels printed on cheap newsprint. After the pulps were introduced, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called “glossies” or “slicks.”
1896 Not all European printers were eager to switch from rags to wood pulp. On April 17, 1896, Menzel & Company’s paper manufactory in Austria conducted a public demonstration to prove that making paper from wood pulp was the best choice because it was cost effective and, above all, speedy.
7:35 a.m. Menzel’s men fell three trees in the presence of a notary. The trees are carried to his factory, cut in pieces 12 inches long, then peeled and split. The split wood is ground into pulp and the pulp is poured into a vat of chemicals. The treated pulp is sent over the hot rollers of the paper machine.
9:34 a.m. The first finished sheet of paper appears. Menzel, still accompanied by the notary, takes a few sheets of the paper to a printing office two and a half miles away.
10:00 a.m. A copy of the printed paper is placed in the hands of the notary, proving that a standing tree could be converted into a newspaper in two hours, 25 minutes.
10:10 a.m. Nagged by a few unforeseen delays, Menzel declares, “I’m certain I can shorten the process by 20 minutes!”
…the fig is ripe enough to eat, the wasp has been completely absorbed.)
First HDTV broadcast: the 1998 launch of the space shuttle Discovery.
DAIRY QUEEN:
THE “BUTTER-COW LADY”
If you’ve ever been to the Iowa State Fair, you know that one of the must-sees is the “Butter Cow,” a life-size cow sculpted from butter. For more than 40 years, they were carved by the “Butter-Cow Lady,” a local celebrity in her own right.
MOOVING STORY
In the summer of 1959, 30-year-old Norma Lyon and her husband, both dairy farmers, showed their family’s cows at the Iowa State Fair. During a break in the festivities, Lyon took some time to tour the other exhibits, including the fair’s famous “Butter Cow,” a life-size cow sculpted out of butter churned from the milk of Iowa cows. The sculptures had been a tradition at the fair since at least 1911.
The fair’s most recent sculptor had retired the year before, so this year’s cow was the work of a new sculptor, a man named Earl Dutt. Lyon was not impressed with Dutt’s work. His cow was more a caricature than a realistic sculpture, she thought. Lyon had a background in animal science and had spent years working with cows on her dairy farm. She’d also studied sculpture in college. She was convinced she could do a better job, and when she met with the organizers of the state fair, she told them so. She offered to sculpt the cow for the following year’s fair. “If I can’t make a better one, I’ll eat it,” she said.
BUTTERFINGERS
The fair organizers hired Lyon to sculpt the cow for the following year. She had six children then, and by the time the fair came around, she was pregnant with her seventh. But she still honored her commitment to sculpt the 1960 butter cow.
The process took three days. Lyon started with a wooden frame covered with metal wire mesh that formed the rough outline of a cow. Then, working with a single handful of butter at a time, she kneaded it and rolled it into a ball in her hands until it was soft enough to press onto the wi
re mesh. She applied one handful after another until the entire frame was covered with about 600 pounds of butter, enough for 19,200 slices of toast. Then, using chisels for broad strokes and dental tools for finer work, she proceeded to sculpt what was perhaps the most lifelike cow ever produced for the Iowa State Fair. The organizers invited Lyons back the next year, and the year after that, and though she had her hands full raising what would eventually be nine kids and helping run the dairy farm, she returned to the state fair to sculpt the butter cow each year for the next 46 years.
The entire frame was covered with about 600 pounds of butter, enough for 19,200 slices of toast.
Ants breathe, but they don’t have lungs. (No insects do.)
AS SEEN ON TV
The butter Jerseys, Holsteins, and Guernseys sculpted by Lyon were created with a serious purpose in mind: to promote Iowa’s dairy industry. But the quaint peculiarity of life-size buttery bovines proved to be irresistible viewing on the relatively new medium of television. In time, Lyon developed a measure of fame in her own right. In 1963 she made an appearance on the game show To Tell the Truth, where celebrity panelists had to guess which of the three mystery contestants on the show was the real Butter-Cow Lady. Lyons proved so knowledgeable about dairy cows that all of the panelists correctly picked her.
Her interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper required more than a ton of butter to sculpt the 13 figures seated at the table.
Lyon’s fame grew to the point that where once people had come to see her butter cows, now they came to see the cows and the Butter-Cow Lady who made them. The exposure prompted other state and county fairs and other agricultural exhibitions to hire her to sculpt cows—and other animals. One pork association commissioned her to sculpt a pig out of pork lard. In 1984 she made an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, and presented Letterman with a cow sculpted from cheddar cheese (cheese is sturdier than butter, easier to transport, and it doesn’t melt as easily under hot TV studio lights).
CATTLE CALL
Beginning in 1984, Lyon started sculpting other objects for the Iowa State Fair in addition to butter cows. One year she sculpted a horse and foal; in another she sculpted country singer Garth Brooks. In subsequent years her subjects included rustic barns, birthday cakes, motorcycles, Smokey the Bear, John Wayne, and Charlie Brown and other Peanuts characters. Her most complicated composition was probably her interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which required more than a ton of butter to sculpt the 13 figures seated at the table.
Lyon kept at it year after year, not stopping even after she suffered a stroke in 1996. She recovered in time to sculpt a cow for the 1997 fair, plus one of her most popular figures ever: a 6-foot-tall butter Elvis, which fairgoers lined up by the hundreds to see. (Lyon wanted to do the King in beef tallow, which would have given him an ivory color, but the beef industry representative at the fair “didn’t want anything to do with it. They’re so down on fat, they almost had a fit. I knew the butter people would jump on it,” she told an interviewer in 1997.)
Gulp? There’s a 1 in 5 chance your coffee mug contains a trace of fecal matter.
MOOVING ON
Lyon retired in 2006. (Her figures for that year’s fair included a cow—of course—and Superman.) She then turned her responsibilities over to her assistant, Sarah Pratt, who has sculpted every butter cow since then.
By the time she retired, Lyon’s fame was such that when Barack Obama, then a junior U.S. senator from Illinois, came to Iowa in 2007 during his campaign for president, he sought her endorsement for the state primary…and got it. “He knows our kids need opportunity here in Iowa so they don’t have to leave home to follow their dreams, even if that dream is 500 pounds of butter shaped like a cow,” Lyon said in a 60-second radio ad she recorded for the Obama campaign. Did it help? Obama’s surprise victory in the January 2008 Iowa caucus established him as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination for president.
One of her most popular figures ever: a 6-foot-tall butter Elvis.
Lyon passed away in 2011 at the age of 81, survived by her husband Joe (still hard at work overseeing the family’s herd of more than 400 dairy cows), their nine children, 23 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. She also lives on in the hearts of many of the millions of people who visited the Iowa State Fair over the years.
PRESSING THOUGHT
More than a few fairgoers have wondered what the state fair did with all the butter used to make each cow after the fair was over. In the early years, the butter was sent off to a pet food factory, where it was used to make dog food. In later years the butter was collected, frozen, and saved until the next year’s fair, when it was used to make another cow. (No word on how many years the butter lasted before it had to be replaced with fresh butter.)
YOU DON’T KNOW “JACK”
You’ve probably heard the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none.” It derisively refers to someone who can do a little bit of everything, but isn’t excellent at any of them. The full version of the phrase actually means the complete opposite: “jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one.”
No. 1 movie at the box office the weekend Star Wars opened in 1977: Smokey and the Bandit.
“TOTAL LOSS OF TONGUE”
In 1863 the United States Congress passed the Civil War Military Draft Act in order to draft as many young men as possible for the Union Army. If you were a pacifist (or rich), you could avoid the draft by finding someone to take your place or by paying a $300 fee. The only other way to get out of service: if you had one of these conditions, as listed in an official circular issued by the War Department’s Provost Marshal General’s Office on November 9, 1863.
“Stammering, if excessive.”
“Total loss of nose; deformity of nose so great as seriously to obstruct respiration.”
“Habitual and confirmed intemperance, or solitary vice, which has so materially enfeebled the constitution as to leave no doubt of the man’s incapacity for military service.” (That means an addiction to “pleasuring” oneself.)
“Tumors or wounds of the neck.”
“Abdomen grossly protuberant.”
“Pain, whether simulating headache, neuralgia in any of its forms, rheumatism, lumbago, or affections of the muscles, bones or joints.”
“Artificial anus” (the 1800s equivalent of a colostomy).
“Stricture of the rectum” (an overly narrow passage which results in painful bowel movements).
“Total loss or nearly total loss of penis.”
“Old and ulcerated internal hemorrhoids.”
“Total loss of a thumb.”
“Urinary fistula” (a hole in the urinary tract).
“Stone in the bladder, ascertained by the introduction of the metallic catheter” (that means if a man thought he had a bladder stone, the military doctor would poke around with a metal tool to see if he really did).
“Loss or complete atrophy of both testicles from any cause.”
“Total loss of the index finger of the right hand.”
“Varicose veins of inferior extremities, if large and numerous, and accompanied with chronic swellings or ulcerations.”
“Total loss of a great toe.”
“Club feet.”
“Loss of a sufficient number of teeth to prevent mastication of food.”
“Total loss of tongue.”
“Epispadia or hypospadia” (a malformed male organ).
“Excessive obesity.”
“Manifest imbecility.”
Tea was invented in 2737 BC. The tea bag was invented in 1904 AD.
A WEEK OF NAKED NEWS
Was there a full moon or something? All of the following incidents occurred just days apart in February 2018.
ROAD TRIP
On February 23, 2018, a Wilmington, North Carolina, man named Derrick Anthony Dunbar, 33, crashed his car while driving at speeds of over 100 miles per hour. According to w
itnesses, after the crash he jumped out of the car, fired several rounds from a handgun, then stripped naked and ran into the woods. A few minutes later, he returned to the car and was putting his clothes back on just as New Hanover County Sheriff’s deputies arrived on scene. They arrested him for indecent exposure, unlawful discharge of a firearm, and “going armed to the terror of the public.” (Dunbar says that his behavior was “out of character” and that someone gave him something that had him “trippin’ out.”)
JOIN THE CLUB
On February 24, a new nightclub called Klubb Naket opened on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm, Sweden. Just as the name suggests, the club encourages its patrons to strip naked; people who do shed their clothes don’t have to pay the cover charge. The club hasn’t impressed Lennard Torebring, the pastor of the nearby Södermalmskyrkan Church. He denounced it as “a breeding ground for depression and broken souls.” “Doing what you want is not good for you. We don’t need less boundaries just because we get older,” he told the StockholmDirekt website. In spite of Pastor Torebring’s protests, the club opening went off without a hitch as about 400 people jammed the venue. The bare facts, according to Eddie Eneqvist, who works at the club: “It was around 50/50 naked, with great respect and understanding.”
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