Mars Blackmon, look out. When it comes to current fads, it's gotta be the shoes. No, not the Jordans -- we're talking about Nike Air Force Ones (#28).

The popular rapper Nelly (#31) has immortalized the shoes in his new single called "Air Force Ones," the #4 single in the country right now according to Billboard. The shoes have been hot in the hip-hop community since a New York company called Remix Da Kicks began modifying and custom-painting the popular sneakers. They paint the shoes in colors to match your favorite NBA jerseys, or they adapt them with leather or corporate logos to prove that you are "ghetto-fabulous." We're getting a lot of searches, for example, for Gucci Air Force Ones.

The song and video have kids everywhere singing the praises of Air Force Ones and looking all over the Web for information on how to get some of their very own. Grab that wallet though, since a typical pair of customized Nikes costs from $150 to $300.

You have to pay for Air Force Ones, but LeBron James will be getting plenty of shoes for free once he gets picked first in next summer's NBA draft. When we called the high-school basketball star "One to Watch," we didn't mean this soon.

This week the James hype machine hit overload with a nationally televised game on ESPN2 and the cover of ESPN the Magazine, and it was almost enough to put James close to the Lycos 50 at #73. Last week this 17-year-old hoopster was more popular on Lycos than Pokemon, Elvis, or Napster.

SING IT: Christmas is #1 again this week, of course, but you may be surprised by seeing Christmas carols debut all the way up at #4. It isn't quite the jump that it seems; this week, we decided to count carols separately for the first time, the same way we count Christmas cards (#9) and Christmas trees (#30). If we had been counting carols separately for the past few weeks, they would have been #6 last week and #21 the week before.

The other new Christmas-related search to debut this week is cookie recipes (#33). In addition to searches for Christmas cookie recipes, other searches for cookie recipes have doubled over the past two weeks and tripled since mid-November.

ON THE LAM: Searches for mobster Whitey Bulger (#27) hit the Lycos 50 this week because of a groundbreaking initiative between Lycos and the FBI. Our company has created a series of virtual Wanted Posters that will be strategically positioned on network sites -- including those of our sister company Terra in Spain and Latin America -- in order to increase the number of people who may be able to spot Bulger. Bulger has been on the run since 1995 and is one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted.

WHISTLIN' DIXIE: We're a bit surprised that the controversy around Trent Lott's praise for the 1948 presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond did not get close to the Lycos 50. In fact, while Lott received far more searches than any senator normally would receive, he would need more than double that number to make the Lycos 50 this week.

Coincidentally, Lott's praise for Dixiecrats received the same number of searches as the popular country band the Dixie Chicks. Lott gets to apologize to blacks, while the Dixie Chicks praise The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, in their hit single "Long Time Gone."

PASSING: For the first time in 80 weeks, file-swapping program Morpheus does not appear on the Lycos 50. Morpheus succeeded Napster as the most popular file-swapping program on the Web and was one of the top ten topics on Lycos every week from August 2001 to April 2002, except for two weeks after the September 11 attacks.

But when government lawyers were done dismantling Napster, they went after Morpheus, and a combination of lawsuits and software changes hurt the program's popularity and paved the way for KaZaA (#2) to take its place atop the Lycos 50.

SHORT SUBJECTS: After coming close to the Lycos 50 for two weeks, toy fad FurReal Friends actually drops in searches this week... Star Trek (#46) is hot thanks to searches for the new movie StarTrek: Nemesis... It was another hot week for lotteries, as four winners split a $100 million jackpot in Saturday's Florida Lottery (#40) but nobody won a $129 million jackpot in Saturday's Powerball (#36). That means Powerball goes to $160 million for Wednesday.

NEW THIS WEEK: Christmas carols, Whitey Bulger, Nike Air Force Ones, cookie recipes, Powerball, Florida Lottery, Star Trek, Martha Stewart.

DROPOUTS: Morpheus, NASA, Shania Twain, Halle Berry, Star Wars, IRS, golf, Atkins Diet.