Sneezes and magpies and fonts

[triskellian]

I get sneezes and magpies confused.

'One for a wish, two for a kiss, three for a letter, four for something better'

'One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told'

I have a feeling the first is sneezes and the second magpies, but I'm not sure. Does anyone know? And do you know any other counting rhymes of the sort?

In other news, my new favourite piece of software is Homesite. My main project over the summer is taking a website made up of over 2,000 files, shoehorning it into CSS and templates, and completely redoing the navigation. I've just discovered, buried deep in a menu, the ability to remove all font tags at the press of one button. Bliss :-)

Comments

Birds and babies

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

The second one is magpies.
It is an omen for the birth of a child. Nicely matches up with pairs of magpies in spring/early summer which is clearly the most sensible time to give birth ;-)

Re: Birds and babies

[triskellian]

I rather liked 'Miniature cockroaches' ;-)

Re: Birds and babies

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

It is a default subject I have from when I feeling lazy at one point ;-)

[chrisvenus]

I've just discovered, buried deep in a menu, the ability to remove all font tags at the press of one button. Bliss :-)

Oooh... where? As a homesite user myself this might actually be damn useful. The number of times I've had a "HTML" file saved from word and cried at all the font tags and everything else in it is... well, twice. But it would be useful anyway. :)

[triskellian]

It's the Codesweeper function - you create a new Codesweeper and tell it to remove all font tags, but ignore everything else. It's already probably saved me hours (not that find'n'replace takes hours, but I get bored so I wander off and do something else in between), and I only discovered it just before posting.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

html tidy is your friend.

One of the configuration options is:

word-2000: bool
If set to yes, Tidy will go to great pains to strip out all the surplus stuff Microsoft Word 2000 inserts when you save Word documents as "Web pages". The default is no. Note that Tidy doesn't yet know what to do with VML markup from Word, but in future I hope to be able to map VML to SVG.

Microsoft has developed its own optional filter for exporting to HTML, and the 2.0 version is much improved. You can download the filter free from the Microsoft Office Update site.

[nevecat.livejournal.com]

Second one is certainly magpies, I've a feel;in that it has a few more lines which are less well-known though (I certainly remember R4 taking more than 7 days to do daily plays based on each of the rhymes ;)

[ealuscerwen.livejournal.com]

According to the Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes, eight for heaven, nine for hell, ten for the devil's own sel'.

Eal.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Didn't you know that every time you sneeze, the sneeze flies up into the air and turns into a magpie? You didn't think magpies just came into existence out of nowhere, did you?

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

They're all quite right: 1 is sneezes, 2 is magpies.

Other counting rhymes - all that springs to mind is the one for cherry stones that says who you'll marry: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

[triskellian]

But don't you only get one stone in a cherry?

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you usually eat more than one at a time! So you count them up afterwards in an eeny-meeny-miny-mo kind of way.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It's all just an attempt to manipulate the superstitious into never eating more than five cherries, thereby leaving more for the rest of us !

[triskellian]

If it's any consolation, I intend to spend the rest of my life eating no cherries ;-)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Smiorgan used these 8 types as a "nature/demeanor"-style mechanic in a game he ran. Which was interesting, but he seems to have dropped the idea.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_alanna/]

Eight for diamonds, nine for a pearl, ten you're a very very very good girl.

Dunno what the male equivalent is!