Don’t say I never gave you anything.

My New Zealandish friend has brought to my attention -- very subtly, of course -- that no competition, giveaway, or offer to buy a round of free drinks (called a “shout” in her country) accompanied my recent milestone of having written a thousand posts on this blog.

I am about to remedy that.

For your amusement and use, here is some html code that you can include in a future celebratory one thousandth post of your own:

$div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"$$ $a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufzFtypZ_I4/T_rStK341hI/AAAAAAAACxI/vfZd-cRHDzo/s1600/1000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"$$ $img border="0" height="333" width="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufzFtypZ_I4/T_rStK341hI/AAAAAAAACxI/vfZd-cRHDzo/s400/1000.jpg" /$$ $/a$$ $/div$$

Before you can use the foregoing, however, it requires a few changes. Everywhere there is a single dollar sign ($), substitute a left caret. Everywhere there is a double dollar sign ($$), substitute a right caret.

You’re welcome. It was nothing. [Editor’s note. Well, actually, it required a little work. When I included the carets, I produced the art that appeared here. But I didn’t want to produce it again in this post; I wanted to give you the code so that you could produce it. Figuring out how to show you the code did tax my brain for a little while.--RWP]

I’m afraid, though, that you’ll have to buy the round of drinks on your own and toast me in absentia.

But after all (he hastened to point out), you now have a few extra dollars, don’t you?