Feel Good Flash Mobs

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Around the Utne Reader offices we read some heavy stuff. Really heavy. The kinds of things you take home with you. The kinds of articles that stick with you, that you talk about at the dinner table when surely there is more appropriate dinner conversation to be had. Things like this. And stories that never leave you, like this.

So it’s nice to lighten it up around here every once in a while. Stacy Conradt over at mental_floss has just the right thing: Flash mob videos! “I love flash mobs. Love them,” Conradt writes. “I know they might be a nuisance to some, but something about total strangers banding together to bust out into seemingly random dance and/or song just makes me smile.”

I couldn’t agree more. Hell even the Black Eyed Peas surprising Oprah with a big dance number made me smile, and if I’m smiling at anything with Oprah and the Black Eyed Peas, it must be doing something right. Of course they’re better when they seem to spontaneously take place in a public area, because the reactions of onlookers are almost as good, if not better, than the performances themselves. (Below are a couple of those, and head on over to mental_floss for Conradt’s complete list of videos.)

Flash mob videos put me in such a good mood, in fact, that I want to encourage the use of emoticons on this post (I generally put emoticons in the same category as the Black Eyed Peas and Oprah). If these videos make you feel good and put a smile on your face, put a smile 🙂 in our comments section below. Let’s see if we can have an online smiley face emoticon flash mob (of sorts) of our own.

Go ahead, watch. It’s Friday afternoon and your boss is probably already gone for the day.

Source: mental_floss

Image by Valerio Pirrera, licensed under Creative Commons.

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