I've been out of town for two days so I'm just now catching up on email.
It's great to see everyone step back and take a calm look at things. Rod, I
especially appreciate your taking time to explain your views in more detail. I
agree with you, I would rather see serious discussion than teasing and jabs. As
we've just seen, email can be badly misinterpreted. I've looked over my
messages and see many places where they were confusing. For example, when I
said "I'll vote with Steve", I meant in finding things to like about the M100,
nothing more. I was not voting for any condemnation of the Chapman list.
Later, when I said "I deny both of them", I meant I deny doing any denegation or
denigration of the Chapman era cars or list. I realize that didn't come across.
However, I believe that in several messages I tried to offer a way to move past
the differences of opinion. In my first message, I said I appreciated the
engineering in all Lotus cars. That seemed like a good way to move on. In
another message, I said "Vive la difference". That seemed like a way to move
on. It didn't happen. Also, my attempts at teasing back at Tony were taken as
insults. Tony, when you made the very vulgar "shower buddies" jab, it had
clearly gone too far and it was time to stop.
Tony and Rod, what seemed to really seemed to start all of this was your belief
that Steve was cutting down the Chapman list. Steve doesn't feel he did that.
Can we resolve this? Everything that follows seems to grow from that. Also,
Steve tells me he is not on the Chapman era list and that his original post was
on the general Lotus list. I am not subscribed there and did not see the
original, only Tony's response. That added to my failure to understand
everything that was going on here.
If you would like, send back some serious replies. Otherwise, we can move on to
other topics.
One last item. I don't want to start the cycle over, but I'm not backing away
from my belief that I find things to like and appreciate in the M100 (as well as
the Esprit and Elise). By the same token, I'll be racing my Seven whenever I
can :-)
Gene
|