7 out of 33 Wishes

I always flip through the various envelopes and magazines of local coupons I get in the mail. A recent Clipper Magazine had a remarkable ad from a psychic who offers to help you realize any 7 wishes you select from a list of 33. For FREE!

I assume this is really a means of harvesting a sucker list. It could be even more dangerous since it asks for date and place of birth. But I wanted to comment on the list of wishes you can choose from on this.

Namely, 6 of them have to do with gambling, e.g. winning a big lottery prize, winning at the casino, win on the horse races. But the others are things that are largely within an individual's control. Do you really need a psychic to help you "get a new car," "make new friends," or "go on a cruise"? So there must be a certain amount of success simply from the psychological boost a believer would get from sending this in.

At one level, I am amused. At another, I am sad that people think they need luck before they can have enough money to buy a house, find true love at last, or travel around the world.

The Way We Were - Recipe Edition

My mother got a blender some time in the 1960's. If I recall correctly, she used it exactly once (to make batter for potato latkes) and decided that it didn't do a good job. But she had a blender cookbook, which she gave me when I was up at her place in early September.

It's not that she expected me to actually use The Blender Way to Better Cooking. She knows that I make the rounds of used book stores and donate what they don't take. But, me being me, it wasn't going into the box to get rid of without my looking through it first. Which makes me glad that we have progressed since 1965.

The "nutritious lemonade" recipe, which basically blends a raw egg into otherwise innocent lemonade, is bad enough. But the kicker is the recipe for "spiced iced coffee". The ingredients for that are:

1 c. cold water
1 6 ounce bottle cola
1/4 c. light cream
1 c. crushed ice
2 T. sugar
1 T. instant coffee
1/8 tsp. cinnamon

That's all blended together and allegedly serves 3 people. Presumably, that means three people who don't actually like coffee.

And that's only on p. 16 of the book!