Earlier today, somebody searched for “how many magpies indicate sorrow” on my blog. I’ve got no idea how they found this site to perform the search – but if you are still around Mr (or Mrs) Random Searcher – here’s your answer..
According to the popular rhyme, 1 magpie indicates sorrow:
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.
But there’s also:
One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret not to be told.
Eight for heaven, nine for hell,
And ten for the devil’s own sel’.
and from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
One’s sorrow, two’s mirth,
Three’s a wedding, four’s a birth,
Five’s a christening, six a dearth,
Seven’s heaven, eight is hell,
And nine’s the devil his old self.
Well, I’ve now finished the redesign of my blog (I think it’s the 3rd redesign so far) . It makes use of PHP, Javascript and CSS – and looks best in Mozilla Firefox (the little “date tabs”/”comments left” etc have rounded corners in Firefox instead of just being square tabs). The HTML (at least of the index page) validates and the CSS nearly validates (just the -moz specific attributes fail the validation – the W3C CSS validator should skip over ‘vendor specific tags’).
Right, I’ve done a bit of redesign work (as you may have noticed) with a nice little picture of yours truly and a blueish fixed header, “fluid” three column layout and without using pixel-specific font size (so it should resize simply in any web browser). Still a bit of work to do on the columns though, but it’s coming along nicely – however, I’m back at work in the next 8 hours, so I just hope I can find some time to finish this off (then I’ve got another couple of sites to build after that).