Lake Garda Pebble Explained Fourteen Times; Original Poster Posts A Second Photo Before Reading Any Of Them

The thread opened at 7:14 on a Tuesday with one photograph of a pale rounded pebble on a windowsill and a single line from Pat Chavez asking where it came from and whether it had ever been in space. Ruth Jenkins answered at 7:25. She asked for a streak, offered the specific-gravity-by-displacement method, noted the absence of fusion crust and regmaglypts, and suggested the stone was ordinary limestone of the kind that lines the eastern shore of the lake where the family had spent two weeks in August. She ended by asking where it had been collected. Pat posted a second photograph at 7:31. It showed the same pebble, wet, on a different windowsill. The second photograph answered nothing, altered no variable except the reflectance of the surface, and arrived before reply one had been opened on his phone. The thread now carried two photographs and fourteen answers to the first. Eric Hayes supplied a hardness comparison and a note on acid reaction, adding that he would not be recommending acid on a stone with a family history. Terry Gonzalez posted a slice of an iron meteorite from his own case for reference, which Ruth answered gently with the observation that reference is not identification. Pat then supplied the provenance his father had given him: it came down in a field near Sirmione, in 1987, in a storm. Nobody wrote down the field. Pat conceded that the family owned the story and not the site, and that this had never before been a problem. Ruth did the streak test on her garage floor, kneeling, the plate's grey line coming off on the toe cap of her Ridgeline GTX, which is due for its field-season resole at the end of the season. The answer was a dusty white. The replies continued to address versions of the question that had already been retired: whether it was tumbled agate, whether it was beach glass, whether it should be cut. Nobody left the thread. Nobody edited their earlier reply. At 11:52 Eric Hayes posted the fourteenth response. It opened with "you're going to ignore this too" and attached a diagram, hand-drawn and then scanned twice, showing the pebble in cross-section with the streak, the hardness and the missing site each labelled in a different pen.