Articles and blog by Steve Simonoff
Bat Mitzvah Speeches
My youngest daughter became bat mitzvah yesterday, so I guess it is a milestone in both of our lives. Parents are encouraged to address the synagogue congregation at these events and it has been my custom to try to say something both a little more humorous and a little more meaningful than the typical safe speech, which is often a short biography of the child who has just transitioned to a young Jewish adult. Though I admit that I try to keep such speeches from being too unpopular, so they are slightly off topic for this blog. But I think a few of the ideas may be worth preserving here. First comes yesterday’s speech for my younger daughter. Then below it, I will include the one I did five years ago for my older daughter.
Steve Simonoff
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The South NH Beach Diet
As mentioned in the previous article, I’ve created a new diet. We live in southern New Hampshire on a lake with a beach. Well, it’s really a boat ramp and only a dozen feet wide. But it has sand and I think it qualifies. So I’m calling this the “South New Hampshire Beach Diet”. However, it is not a joke. It really works and is as close to effortless as anything I’ve ever experienced, culinary or otherwise.
Of course, it is not totally new, being “low carb” like the popular Atkins and South Beach diets. But my South NH Beach Diet has some important differences that I think make it superior, through potentially less popular. So this is yet another unpopular idea.
The Calorie Fallacy
I’ve been eating differently and the results have been dramatic, one the few seemingly “miraculous” events in my life. It has been a diet of my own devising and I cover it the next article. But one cornerstone is that I stopped eating all starches and sugars. My theory is that a calorie is not really a calorie - that calories eaten have very little to do with calories of weight gain.
Conventional wisdom is that weight is ruled by energy balance. Calories consumed minus calories expended equals calories of fat gain. It is called conservation of energy, or sometimes the first law of thermodynamics. And it is beyond dispute that conservation of energy applies to all systems, including our bodies. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom about calories, while very popular, is very wrong. At least that is my unpopular idea.
Eulogies
My mother recently died and the task of talking about her life fell to me at the memorial service. Though it is off topic even for a blog a wildly diverse as this one, I think she would have wanted some kind of permanent written record of her life (beyond the inevitable birth and death certificates that in the end are often all that survive). I certainly would if it were me.
Of course the question arises whether a blog offers any real permanence in the long term. It is a new literary form with evolving norms, but my guess is that many blogs will survive, possibly in third-party “way-back” style archives and probably because heirs may be reluctant to turn off and discard blogs when their authors die. I think it might become common for heirs to keep paying the small bills to keep the blog running as a memorial. And even if not, survivors might well copy at least some of the blog to other web sites.
So here is Lorraine Simonoff’s eulogy for posterity. Below that is another short eulogy I gave ten years ago for R. Leonard White, my wife’s father.
Thanksgiving and Murder
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. As we consumed our turkey and various veggie dishes, the subject of furs came up. Fur coats seem to be coming back into fashion a bit, but fashions have changed. After we old folks discussed whether it is economic to re-tailor old floor-length furs into shorter coats or stoles, I happened to ask my daughter whether she might want a fur trimmed coat for the upcoming gift-giving season. We have yet to come up with a “big holiday gift” for her and I’d seen some fur-trimmed leather vests at the mall that looked great. “No way”, was her response. Not even with fake fur? (I would probably be too cheap to get her the real thing in any case.) No, it’s just too politically incorrect for her and I can understand that. Popularity is important to our society, so important that it creates its own rational. So forget that we were consuming a murdered bird, that we all had no objection to wearing leather, and that the “fur” would probably come out of an oil well.
I’m not going to argue that killing animals for their fur should be moral. My daughter distinguishes killing for food from killing for more frivolous reasons and she has a point. My point, made at the table yesterday and the the assembled throngs of you reading this today, is that killing plants should be even less moral than killing animals for whatever reason. So maybe the real sin was that we had just murdered a wide assortment vegetables for our dinner.
How Unpopular Can I Get?
Social Darwinism, Capitalism and Charity
I once made the mistake of proposing to our Rabbi that “Social Darwinism” might help explain Israel’s seemingly miraculous victories in the decades following World War II. After all, in addition to being very lucky, those that survived the Holocaust and made their way to Palestine were probably among the most persistent and enterprising of the Jews who lived in Europe before the war. It was a bad idea, or at least a highly unpopular one. I won’t try that one again here. But I will argue that a good form of Social Darwinism is alive and well in the guise of capitalism. Plus you’ll receive my even less popular critique of charity at no extra charge!
Our Evil Federal Budget
Some acquaintances of ours have a sign on their vehicle with a pie chart of government spending. It’s a big sign, occupying the whole side of their van plus a large sheet metal extension above their roof (which is very nicely done, though probably not very fuel efficient). So I guess they are making a big point. And the point seems to be that US military spending is over 50% of the total budget. As a country, we are spending half our resources on killing people in various ill advised foreign adventures. That’s a very bad thing, right?
The Death Gene
Is death an acquired trait? We like to think of death as unavoidable. We believe that all things must die. It makes our own mortality easier to bear. Yet single-celled forms don’t necessarily ever die. They can beat the odds and indeed every surviving amoeba on earth has been alive billions of years. So maybe death is not inevitable and is just an evolutionary trait.
A (Sort Of) Better Calendar
Our twelve month calendar might be the world’s oldest information data structure, save language itself. And it shows its age. How does it go? “Thirty days has September, April, June and November, all the rest have 31.” Except February, with 28 or 29 days. The number of days in a month varies and our seven-day week does not coincide with our months. Even if you know the date, you still have to ask the day of the week. There is an arguably better way, though it is probably too late to change.
Unpopular Ideas
Almost by definition, popular ideas are sort of boring. If we want something new and better, we must start with what’s currently out of fashion.
This site is called “Unpopular Ideas” because 1) I have noticed that many of my opinions have long been what you you might call non-mainstream and 2) the UnpopularIdeas.com domain was available. You many not agree with these essays. After all, they are unpopular ideas. But I hope you find them interesting and worth discussing.