Cookies!

I love music. I love cookies almost as much as I love music. And today is the 100th birthday of Oreo cookies. I think I first heard about Oreos when LL Cool J rapped about them in his song "I'm Bad" (watch), back in 1987 - "...forget Oreos, eat Cool J cookies, I'm BAAADDD!". Took them a long time to turn up in New Zealand though. Now they're in almost every Asian supermarket.

A flashmob in Los Angeles.  Picture: Frazer Harrison / Getty

from News.com.au "... Flash mobs celebrated the centenary in seven US cities including Los Angeles, where country rock trio Lady Antebellum led a shopping-mall crowd of several hundred in singing "Happy Birthday" to the venerable comfort food.... there were fireworks in Shanghai, birthday fetes in Saudi Arabia, special playgrounds in Indonesia and pinata-breaking in Venezuela....

...They first popped out of the oven at the Nabisco factory in New York's Chelsea district ... and sold by a grocer on the other side of the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey....

Among African Americans, in the Black Power era, calling someone an Oreo - black on the outside, white on the inside - was a painful put-down, as Gerald Thompson recalled in Reflections of an Oreo Cookie, a 1991 memoir.

"This was 1970, a year of no middle ground," he wrote, remembering the day he was slapped in the face and likened to a mere cookie. "You allied yourself black or white, but I was not aware of any of this."