(Note to CRC: allusion to stateside 1960s ad campaign for "breath mint") (armchair psychology follows)
—or I could be wrong, but I never thought that Ross was "hounded" out of here, or for that matter fled because he couldn't take the heat. True, he often found himself a minority of one, and deservedly so, rhapsodizing about the bucolic antebellum South (although I suspect that many of the dismissive responses, my own included, were delivered with less thought than the provocative posts deserved) or lapsing into that snarling misogyny to which he was lamentably prone. I'm inclined to believe, though, that his withdrawal from these parts was probably of a piece with a broader retreat from online engagement—something I find intermittently, albeit briefly, necessary for my own stability, and deSitter's nerves are tuned to a higher pitch, and hence the more tautly strung, than mine own. Personal circumstances permitting, he may be disposed at some point to rejoin us (I would be prepared to pay admission to see him spar with bionerd), or it may be that he looks back on IWT as I do on unfiltered Camels: a youthful indulgence wistfully recalled but best not revisited. I hope for the former: at his best his discourses were dazzling, and his posts reliably struck sparks off the other members.
And while it grieves me to differ with our Teuton of the Tundra, I respectfully submit that when we speak of lunacy no one here, not Ross at his most eccentric, not Ashton at his most obscurely oracular, is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with He Who Must Not Be Named (And Didn't He Have a Lot of Them), who fortunately remains sui generis in the history of these precincts.
cordially,