bel,

I can shed only a dim ray of light on Mr xara's culinary reference. As I understnad it, a "cookie" is a little piece of information that gets tucked away in the bowels of your computer (if cookies-in-bowels is not abhorrent imagery!) so that a web site can keep track of some information about you. Typically - and hopefully - innocuous stuff that lets the website customize its content towards your preferences, based on its knowledge from the cookie of what pages/subjects/links you've clicked on. I'm not sure how AWAD is using its cookies - something to do with page numbers of multi-page threads. The above explanation is all my own. I'm sure that some more Web-literate readers, such as Mr xara himself, will have a better explanation, or links to a site that explains it better.