Cheri, I had no idea what you meant by the devil! I was assuming that you were referring to something that I had in my post. I felt that you knew how to do things like :-), but I decided to play it safe. [When I wrote this, I used colon, hyphen, and parenthesis closed. When I previewed it, I got a yellow emoticon!] This reminded me of something that happened decades ago. During my college years, I earned money with the USDA's cotton insect survey during the summer. I had just finished my count and was headed toward my vehicle. A car pulled up and a man got out. He walked into the field to meet me. He grinned and asked, "What are these plants?" I thought that it might be the farmer (I couldn't see the license plate.), and that he was pulling my leg. To be on the safe side, I answered, "cotton." The man indicated that he and his wife had been seeing fields of this for miles. When he saw me, he thought he could find out. Thank you for educating me regarding doing the emoticons here. Lawton

Leon, How interesting! So different browsers behave differently with this site. Hmmmm. I think I've tried hovering before, but will try it again. Now I'm quite curious. By the way, I've lost the ability to copy and paste for some reason. Not just in Adland, but in anything. Very annoying and inconvenient. Maybe weird stuff is contagious. Cheri

Hi, Lawton I'll give you my standard answer: well, I've got you fooled then, lol. I only found out the smiley, frowny and winky because I was using the standard keyboard versions, just as you did. A friend from Adland discovered the mischievous devil while trying to post a 6 in parentheses for another purpose, and told us about it. I only know how to do a tiny bit of html formatting, and had to be taught that by other Adland friends. I've just been here long enough to learn a few tricks. That's a funny story, about the cotton. It never fails that if you return a sarcastic answer thinking someone is joking, they aren't and you leave them completely bewildered. I have an aunt who was an extremely gullible 15-year-old when she married my uncle. He used to tell her that fur coats grew on fir trees and other nonsense that she believed, according to family lore. I'm almost as bad because I'm so literal-minded, except when it's me making the joke. Here, I make sure to use an emoticon or an acronym like 'lol' to indicate I'm joking. Otherwise, it's too easy to offend when I'm only trying to be funny (with mixed results, usually). Cheri

Cheri, No, I found that using one browser and then a different one doesn't matter. It must matter who you are... if it works or not. (6) This thread has gotten a bit off topic, but maybe that was a good thing. I have seen an increase back to the mormal in my inbox notifications about Adland posts. Oh well... maybe I was wrong about the one forum thing reducing the email. Leon

So, what happened in that last post? Got the emoticon to show up that time. It must have something to do with its position relative to other text in the body of your message. Here is an experiment with the devil (6) in some text and the devil on a line by itself. (6) So, I guess we learned a little more. Maybe I haven't been singled out this time. ;-) ;-) :-) :-( This proves the emoticon has to follow some text for it to show up correctly. Peace, Leon