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Michelle Delio writes in wired.com about something new on the internet: Mob Projects, where a group of people agree by e-mail to suddenly turn up together to play a practical joke. Recently, 200 people went to Macy’s department store in Manhattan to buy a “Love Rug” for their “commune,” and gangs of drunken Santas have been seen in San Francisco around Christmas time.

Mob Projects are as exclusive as a fashionable club?you can’t just join, you have to be invited. “Everyone loves a mindless mob!” said Merilyn Synder. “I was so stoked when I got my invitation?no action, no protest, no needing to review my political stance on a particular issue. Just be there or be square.”
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Kari Huus writes on msnbc.com that the Japanese, who have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, are forming suicide pacts on the internet. On Sunday, the bodies of four young Japanese men were found in a car, and evidence that they’d all agreed to kill themselves together was found on their computers. These suicide pacts have resulted in 18 deaths so far this year.
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Phuong Ly writes in the Washington Post about Maryland eighth graders and best friends Karen, Mary and Kristin, who are real-life “Charlie’s Angels,” helping the FBI bust internet pedophiles. In Operation Innocent Images, FBI agents pose as teenage girls and try to strike up internet conversations with these guys, hoping to catch them. But agents are too old to know what’s “cool,” so they need help from these three, who’ve been teaching agents across the country how to sound like genuine teenage girls. It’s hard though?the first time they gave the FBI agents a quiz, the agents all failed.
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?Not the kind that pop up on the internet, asking for your vital statistics, but the kind you dip into tea and eat. There’s now a website devoted to these kinds of cookies (or “biscuits,” as the English call them), that rates which ones taste best.

The site features a “biscuit of the week” and helps people track down their childhood favorites or brands they didn’t think were being made anymore. “Many people think if a supermarket does not carry a biscuit they will not find it anywhere,” says webmaster Stuart Payne, “but what we find is that big supermarkets do not stock what you find in the corner shops.”
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