Riddles

[alixtii]

Firefox doesn't seem to like me any more; it keeps freezing. And whatever happened to ?style=mine?

Anyway, I have The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes which I got mainly to help me write Drusilla. In it are a couple of "riddles":

As I was going o'er London Bridge,
And peeped through a nick,
I saw four and twenty ladies
Riding on a stick.

Solution: sparks.

As I was going o'er London Bridge,
I heard something crack;
Not a man in all England
Can mend that!

Solution: ice.

ETA: And here's another, just as impenetrable:

I went into my grandmother's garden,
And there I found a farthing.
I went into my next door neighbour's;
There I bought a pipkin and a popkin,
A slipkin and a slopkin,
A nailboard, a sailboard,
And all for a farthing.

Solution: a tobacco pipe.

ETA2:

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I think I speak for everyone when I say "Huh?"

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. But hey, I'm not the one who wrote them.

[r-becca.livejournal.com]

This comment is completely unrelated to the post, but I wanted to stop by and say hi. :) I keep seeing you around, so I decided to eliminate the middleman and friend you. So... hi. :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Shiny.

And the original post was incredibly, unarguably random. Therefore everything is automatically relevant,

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

?style=mine is working for me.

As for the riddles . . . I can kind of understand the ice one (like hearing an icicle break or something), and I guess the third one is supposed to be that a tobacco pipe could be all these things to a kid (though the fact that most of the words seem to be made up words makes it unfairly difficult to guess), but I really dislike the first one. Where does one see sparks on London Bridge? And what's up with 24? I could see the answer being flames (i.e. on candles) if it had something to do with a church, but . . . .

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

For the second one it's supposed to be the Thames freezing, but I have the same doubts as you do about the first one.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay, I guess that makes sense for the ice one, though the idea of an intent to "mend" it is still weird.

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

for Firefox, try disabling your extensions one at a time and see what happens.

style=mine will not work if format=light is also set. Somebody on metafandom keeps including format=light in their links which may be what you are seeing.