Recently I've written about the Leica M10, which in the version I have here for testing is a luxury Veblen Good worth $14,000 ($10,000 for the camera and $4,000 for the lens). More recently I've been writing about the camera system in the iPhone 13 Pro. Mine cost $800 for the whole phone; but it does other things besides taking pictures.
It seems to me that, for an enthusiast, advanced amateur, semi-pro, or art photographer, the iPhone is both highly quirky and, in the end, not quite enough camera. The Leica M10 Reporter is both highly quirky, and, in the end, rather too much camera.
Which brings us to Goldilocks.
Fairy tale and meme
The fairy tale known as "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," originally written by Robert Southey, the British poet, in 1837, probably from folk sources, was originally about three male bachelor bears and an old woman. The old lady didn't become a little girl until 1849, and then she went more than a half-century without the familiar name, which she didn't acquire until 1904. There have been innumerable variations of the story. None is agreed upon as authoritative. (I've reproduced one version as an addendum below.)
Likewise, the moral of the story remains elusive. For the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, it depicted a child on a journey to adult independence who is waylaid by a regressive attempt to insinuate herself back into the sort of nuclear family to which she no longer belongs. Which seems a tad obtuse. To Alan C. Elms, writing in The Journal of American Folklore, the story deals with anality (issues of cleanliness, regulation, and order) for preschoolers, who he thinks should identify with the tidy and orderly bears rather than with the unregulated intruder. No one that I know of has suggested an environmentalist interpretation, viz., that humans are barging in and creating carnage in natural animal habitats, but that doesn't not make sense. Suffice to say that interpretation is a matter of judgment rather than settled fact.
The primary superficial essence that society currently prefers is to toss out any deeper interpretations and emphasize the "just rightness" part. You try one thing, it's not quite right because of this; you try another thing, and it's not quite right because of that. So you're trying to calibrate down to the exact just-rightness somewhere in the middle. (Which you then either consume, destroy, or appropriate for your own use, but never mind.) This has been formalized as "the Goldilocks Principle," and it's applied to all sorts of things, including machine learning, astrobiology, statistics, and developmental psychology.
Another way of looking at this is that we've reduced the story down to a meme about...shopping. That's the usual meaning of our cultural shorthand around the word "Goldilocks"—never mind that none of it belonged to her in the first place. Goldilock's dilemmas are also a shopper's happy task: deciding which to get. Shopping takes a high and central place among our activities.
I've articulated my views many times, but here I go again. My observation over the years is that the closer two competing products are to each other, the greater the likelihood that shoppers will bear down on the Goldilocks aspect of shopping, and the more effort they will expend on determining "which is best." But logically, what should happen is the opposite: the closer two competing products are to each other, the less it matters which one you choose. Honda or Toyota is like Coke or Pepsi. Who cares? Eenie-meenie-miney-mo and hit the road.
A great ongoing debate of the 'nineties and the 'aughts among hobbyists was, "should I get a Nikon or a Canon?" The upshot was a river of endless debate. My smarty-pants answer to the question at the time was "yes." That is, get a camera and get on with it. Nobody cares what you shoot with. Suit yourself.
Property rights
If you think of it, it's piggish of us to assume that "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is only about just-rightness. There's more to it than that. With all due respect to Bettleheim and Elms, a more sturdy and plainspoken interpretation a little closer to the surface is that it's a cautionary tale about private property—and we ought to sympathize with the characters whose home is being invaded. The real moral should be that you can't go around appropriating things that don't belong to you—on account of your eventual comeuppance will have claws and teeth. You oughtn't to mess with one bear, much less three. Especially when Mama's got a cub. Who doesn't know that?
The story doesn't give G. much of a comeuppance. She gets away scot-free, albeit after being frightened. Really, Goldilocks ought to get eaten herself at the end, or, failing that, at least tossed into the hoosegow and tried for trespassing, B&E, burglary, and vandalism. But in that case, since she's a "celeb"—I mean, who hasn't heard of her?—the entitled little blonde would just instruct her "people" to pay out of court for the damage to the house and the missing porridge, her lawyers would get the bears to sign a gag agreement as part of the settlement, and that would be that. It's all about her.
Hasa at Pediaa writes, "The moral of the story is the need to respect the privacy and property of others and how your actions hurt others. What Goldilocks does by entering another’s house and using their property is wrong." And as Benjamin Marks notes in his Featured Comment below, "Think about who isn't in the story: any grown-up. The story is therefore about how you act when no one is monitoring your behavior." So—of course, human nature being what it is—we've got a tale about respecting the rights of others and behaving properly when you're not being observed, and what have we taken from it? Little Goldilocks' method for choosing what to steal, damage, and use without permission. Figures.
But talk about comeuppance—in one early version (not Southey's), the little old lady who eventually morphed into Goldilocks gets impaled on the steeple of a church.
Anyway, this whole post is a digression (I get interested in stuff). What I was starting out to say is that in between medium-format digital and a smartphone, there's a middle ground, a just-right balance of all the competing factors. I think it can be narrowed down to a few cameras, but I'm going to narrow it down to one. Unfortunately, it's a camera very few people want. I take Saturdays (housekeeping day) and Mondays (pool day) off now, so I'll propose what I think is the just-right camera on Sunday—and then I—I mean all of us—get to hear why the experienced and wise TOP Commentariat disagrees with my choice.
Should be fun. See you on Sunday.
Mike
(Second illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith; cartoon by Gaspirtz)
ADDENDUM:
The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks. She went for a walk in the forest. Pretty soon, she came upon a house. She knocked and, when no one answered, she walked right in.
At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.
"This porridge is too hot!" she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
"This porridge is too cold," she said.
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
"Ahhh, this porridge is just right," she said happily and she ate it all up.
After she'd eaten the three bears' breakfasts, she decided she was feeling a little tired. So, she walked into the living room where she saw three chairs. Goldilocks sat in the first chair to rest.
"This chair is too big!" she exclaimed.
So she sat in the second chair.
"This chair is too big, too!" she whined.
So she tried the last and smallest chair.
"Ahhh, this chair is just right," she sighed. But just as she settled down into the chair to rest, it broke into pieces! Goldilocks was very tired by this time, she went upstairs to the bedroom. She lay down in the first bed, but it was too hard. Then she lay in the second bed, but it was too soft. Then she lay down in the third bed and it was just right. Goldilocks fell asleep.
As she was sleeping, the three bears came home.
"Someone's been eating my porridge," growled the Papa bear.
"Someone's been eating my porridge," said the Mama bear.
"Someone's been eating my porridge and they ate it all up!" cried the Baby bear.
"Someone's been sitting in my chair," growled the Papa bear.
"Someone's been sitting in my chair," said the Mama bear.
"Someone's been sitting in my chair and they've broken it to pieces," cried the Baby bear.
They decided to look around some more and when they got upstairs to the bedroom, Papa bear growled,
"Someone's been sleeping in my bed.”
"Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too" said the Mama bear.
"Someone's been sleeping in my bed and she's still there!" exclaimed the Baby bear.
Just then, Goldilocks woke up. She saw the three bears. She screamed, "Help!" And she jumped up and ran out of the room. Goldilocks ran down the stairs, opened the door, and ran away into the forest. She never returned to the home of the three bears.
THE END
(This version from DLTK-teach.com)
Book o' the Week
Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.
The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.
Our link to B&H Photo
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
SteveW: "I've been reading TOP for some years now, but not as long as many of the long-time readers, but long enough to keep coming back and enjoying the positive vibe of the blog, and also the Commentariat. I find TOP a breath of fresh air in the land of the web. But the point I want to make is that I think Mike's hard work on New Yorker articles has spilled over onto TOP. The recent posts have elevated Mike's game. I'm really enjoying TOP these days, even more than usual. Thank you Mike."
Peter Wright: "With all these OT posts—pool, watches, bunnies!!!, I think it’s time we had an OT post on something many of us find interesting, and that you have covered in the past. I refer of course to hi-fi and music, especially jazz. Did you really get into streaming? Get new speakers? What are you listening to? We need a catch-up OT post."
Benjamin Marks: "I think the Goldilocks principle became shorthand because so much of the observed world can serve as a reference point. Questions like: 1.) why is there something, rather than nothing? 2.) why did Earth develop a thriving ecosystem, and not Mars? and so on, seem to have a tautological answer: because some set of factors were in the middle of some range of possibilities (not to far from the sun, just the right amount of matter vs. antimatter and so on). But the sanitized version of that story didn't get told to establish that principle...it's just a byproduct of good narrative structure and the 'rule' of threes (not a rule, but still).
"The story is a morality play and it features bears rather than your next door neighbors so that it has general applicability as moral lessons ought to have in order to be as persuasive as possible. Think about who isn't in the story: any grown-up. The story is therefore about how you act when no one is monitoring your behavior.
"Face it: you'd hate to live next to Goldilocks in a property-oriented society. In one in which there is communal responsibility for children, the story probably makes no sense at all."
David Dyer-Bennet: "Dear me; Coke and Pepsi being similar to each other? What a weird notion! When we did a careful double-blind cola tasting first, back in the '80s, nobody failed to distinguish the major brands, and nobody failed to distinguish diet from real. Most of the test crew could accurately identify glass bottles vs. plastic bottles vs. metal cans. (You knew that was going to draw comments, didn't you? It's probably bigger than Mac vs. PC and certainly bigger than vi vs. Emacs.)"
hugh crawford: "These days I think that Goldilocks is about the illusion of choice. You can pick anything you want as long as it’s bear stuff."
mark: "Cameras and bunnies and bears, oh my!"
