Leaderboard

Excuse me - make that "I'll pay for a year's premium membership to the FIRST person who posts correctly the geographic corridor and it's geographic significance to bigfoot encounters."

There are a bunch of issues you have to resolve in order to get something like this working: 1) who is going to be in charge? Somebody has to be responsible and have the ultimate say. 2) will it be a nonprofit organization? 3) how are you going to raise money to pay for the various activities necessary to run the organization? 4) will you reimburse members who go out and investigate a sighting? 5) if a member does an investigation and gets the "money shot", who owns the material? Can the member sell it and keep all the profit? Etc, etc We found that we could not overcome some of these issues.

From my perspective, those are wrong questions because they includes terms that have implied value judgements I'm not sure are appropriate. They're fundamentally anthropomorphic. I didn't call my cat ugly because it didn't look human. It was a cat. "Ugly" brings implications of such great similarity that the slight differences become unsettling. I did not find either bigfoot I saw "ugly" but neither were they exactly, precisely, identically human either. They just were what they were. "Scary looking" doesn't compute unless you're talking about a dog with very large teeth or a bear with very big claws. "Scary" is a behavior, not an appearance .. at least for me. "Scary looking" means, to me, the person offering the description is fundamentally a fearful person who is looking for a way to rationalize their fear rather than deal with it. "Friendly appearing" is much the same ... it's an interpretation of behavior, not how the thing truly looks. A nice open smile may actually be the baring of teeth ... a warning of great aggression to come. Sometimes it is easier to deal with wider differences where you KNOW there are differences rather than greater similarity where you can stumble into the pitfall of assuming similarity that isn't truly there. I don't know if this makes any sense at all or if it is just a reflection of an internal dialog I'm having. If it makes no sense, I apologize for subjecting you to me talking to myself. MIB