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Posted by Serpwidgets on August 03, 2002 at 01:20:40:
In Reply to: It seems to me that the Cornsnake manual is exactly ..(long) posted by abell82 on August 03, 2002 at 00:03:23:
What you are talking about.Especially when combined with a lesser known/mentioned book"A Color Guide to Corn Snakes" ;Michael J. McEachern,1991 Advanced Vivarium Systems(If you do not have it get it!).Now it seems that both books have there short comings,such as not enough pics,not printed often enough, not enough in depth explanation (and pics)of hybrids(kings,gopher,bull,milk,etc....)But these are very good books to begin with.I am not against a "guide" to color morphs just price "guides".
I have no interest in the price guide thing either, and I think you make a good point about it being an external control on the market, which is rarely (if ever) a good thing.
But the problem with the CSM and the CGTCS is that they do not assert themselves as official, and I believe that something which is recognized as "official" is what's really needed to stop the commonly accepted standards in both appearances and names from being ignored. I also have the Color Guide. IIRC both books even state explicitly that they are not meant to be official.
(BTW whatever happened to Michael McEachern?)
The other problem is that whatever it is needs to be all-inclusive and dynamic enough to keep up with the changes. There are new combinations being bred every year, and new names coined for them. 3 years after a new combination has been bred by one or two people, there will already be a whole slew of names out there to try to clean up.
The point I was making with the stamp guide was that you can go to a stamp collectors show, look at a stamp on display, compare what that seller says it is to what is shown and described in the guide for that specific issue of stamp, and be reasonably sure that the stamp in question is in fact the one he is supposed to be selling. If it's not, you have the book right there as support. And when everyone is walking around with that little book, it discourages people from even trying to mislabel stuff because they know someone will call them on it, and then the guy can't sell anything because 50 people just walked by and saw him being exposed as a scam artist. :)
Obviously it won't be as simple with some of the "Phase" morphs of corns, but in that case if we started arguing over it, we wouldn't be arguing about the definition I learned through a huge game of telephone versus the definition you heard through another huge but unrelated game of telephone. We would instead be arguing over how to interpret the same exact definition that everyone else has an identical copy of. :) (And thus the standard starts to assert itself and become accepted as "official.")
Off on a tangent: IMO the beanie babies and pokemon and other items that are specifically manufactured for the purpose of being "collectors items" are no different than ponzai schemes. In the end, they rely on the idea that someone else down the line will pay more than was previously paid. The only people that really make money on it are the ones who started it, and then everyone else is stuck with a bunch of worthless junk that nobody else wants to buy because no new people are coming into the pyramid to continue raising the prices, and nobody who isn't into the scheme wants to pay $1000 for a stuffed toy that they can get in any happy meal for $2. ;-)
I was trying to explain to my nephew that even if he had a pokemon card that the book said was worth $600, it still wouldn't be worth $600 until he could find someone with $600 that was willing to buy it. It's a brilliant scam, really. The same people who sell the cards can publish the price guide that says that some of them are worth huge sums of money. Nobody ever has to even buy one for that amount, they can just make up arbitrary figures. And then the kids can be "justified" in spending truckloads of money (more like their parents' money) on the cards because hey, some of them are worth $600, and we will get our money back on it when we buy that $600 card in a $1 pack of gum... LOL. :)
Heh, imagine if they instead publish a price guide that says the common one that you get in every 3rd pack is worth $500... they could sell even more of them, muahahaha! :)
