I want to make sure it's fully clear...

...the Jones-Yelvington-Erlewine flame war was a joke. David Erlewine, Meg Pokrass and I were all in on it. This is the why the tone of the flame posts was exagerrated and outlandish.

I did not think this needed to be clarified, but then I received an anonymous comment on the third entry in the series that seemed genuinely hostile. The anonymous commenter may have been playing along, but the comment seemed to me to take things in a much less playful, more vicious direction.

I wasn't going to respond, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make sure no one else thought I was genuinely bashing David Erlewine, a man I workshop with regularly and whose writing I admire a great deal.