Yeah, they were both very colorful members to put it mildly--and honestly I'm a bit disappointed that they both disappeared, because they tended to make the forum a much more interesting place.  Lauda was a straight-up drama hound (in a way that I always found entertaining), and TMAN was just funny as hell with some of the stuff he wrote.

By the way, I might be off base in making this statement, as I haven't checked Lauda's merit history but he was pretty stingy as far as handing them out, and I'm pretty sure he was particularly ungenerous toward lower-ranked members, whom he viewed as the root cause of a lot of the forum's issues with low-value posts.  TMAN, on the other hand, would drop 50 merits at a time and I think he was a merit source.  Not sure if Lauda was one, though I'm sure someone here knows.