>I'm sure Caitlin filled you in about the "basket case" known as Zeide G. Erskine.
Actually, no, she didn't. My path of trying to figure the whole thing out these last few days has been as follows:
Initially I'd been reading along thinking Zeide was simply one of the pearl experts. Then I started noticing that there were times when someone would post as if they were replying to her, but I wouldn't have remembered seeing her earlier in the thread, and indeed, going back, she wasn't there. So I'd figured out that somehow some of her posts had disappeared, but didn't know how/why. I figured she'd left and deleted a bunch of her posts on her way out the door (I've seen that happen before, as I've been a mod on a different internet board for about five years or so). So I went to Zeide's profile and tried to look at her most recent posts, trying to figure out why she might have left. That told me nothing, possibly because the most recent had already been deleted.
Then I noticed a running joke about 'lop noors', but had no idea where it was coming from.
Then today, I was going through an old thread and found a discussion about her having lied, that she made a lot of stuff up ... Caitlin kept talking about -- 'hooey' -- I think was the word she used, and that she'd been misrepresenting freshwaters and had finally been banned. That thread also talked about the lop noors again, and that's where I read that some of 'Zeide's' posts had been deleted (which finally made those initial missing posts make a little more sense ... where people seemed to reply to her even though she'd been 'absent' from the thread). So finally that first 'mystery' had been solved.
I think I understand it now, but no, what I've figured out has just been from a h*ll of a lot of reading.
(I do have more leisure time at the moment ... hubby had gall bladder surgery just before thanksgiving so we're still taking it a little more easy, plus I'm in the lull between the Thanksgiving and Christmas 'family/inlaw' invasions. I've read a lot ... and I mean a lot. But as I said, it's an incredible, incredible education.
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