Lately differences are seemingly everywhere.  Stephen Covey, author of the 1989 hit self-help book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” assured us that “Strength lies in differences, not in similarities,” but I’m not convinced. Even good and bad appear up for debate.  At least we know little boys are inherently bad, because Mother Goose, or her agents, told us so in the early 1800s.  The legendary English folklorists, Iona and Peter Opie reported that at least parts of “What Are Little Boys Made Of?,” one of Longfellow’s favorites, is attributed to the poet Robert Southey, and it was.  You’ll recall that little boys are composed of “Snips, snails, And puppy-dogs’ tails,” or are they?  Some experts believe that instead of “snips,” or “little bits,” the word was originally a Cumbrian dialect term, “snigs,” or “little eels.” All versions of the poem are labeled as Roud #821 housed at the Vaughn Williams Memorial Library in London, which is operated by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  Their “Honorary Librarian,” Steve Roud, created the Roud Folk Song Index, a database that correlates versions of 25,000 folk songs in the English language.  Little boys’ innate badness has also been drummed into us via “Georgie Porgie,” who gorged on pies and accosted girls in the early 1800s.  There are several likely real-life bad boys the poem referred to, but its target was probably King George IV, famous for his huge appetites for food, including pudding and pie, and for bedmates.

            In garden beds it’s harder to tell good lady bugs from bad ones, but that’s cleared up in “Differences Between Ladybugs and Asian Ladybugs,” a Better Homes and Gardens article by Viveka Neveln.  Our native ladybugs are the gardeners’ friends, but in “the late 1970s and early 1980s, Asian lady beetles were intentionally released by the Department of Agriculture in several Southern states, as well as California, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland, to control aphids and scale pests. Asian lady beetles can now be found across the continental United States and parts of Canada.”  They do eat garden pests, but they also bite, stink, and crowd out our local ladybugs that are smaller and rounder and have “red shells and various numbers of black spots. Their heads tend to be black with small white ‘cheeks’ … Asian lady beetle shell color can range from light orange to bright red, so most will have a similar color to a ladybug. Asian lady beetles also have larger white “cheek” markings and have more white on their heads overall.  You can also tell by looking “at the spot where the head meets the wings. If the bug in question has a black ‘M’ marking in that spot, that’s a telltale sign you’re dealing with an Asian lady beetle.”

Last week a definitely good thing arrived from the Winterthur Museum and Library: their poison bookmark.  It’s not poisonous itself but features swatches of seven difference shades of green on one side that show the colors of book covers mass-produced in the 1800s that contain arsenic and another set of seven green ones on the verso showing greens associated with arsenic-laced paper.  Free sets of five bookmarks and related information can be had from the library’s Poison Book Project.  That’s good, but back in 1991, Professor John Quentin Feller, a renowned authority on Chinese export ceramics, confessed to stealing over 100 precious ceramic objects from Winterthur.  A NYTimes article on him noted that “the International Foundation for Art Research dubbed Professor Feller a Robin Hood of the arts because he frequently stole from one museum or private collection and lent or donated the spoils to another.” Still, he was very bad.

Meanwhile, those little girls are constituted of “everything nice,” but is nice a good thing?  Turns out that the student’s plagiarizing pal, ChatGPT, has become too nice.  In “ChatGPT Cancels Latest Update After It Became ‘Dangerously Sycophantic’,” a recent article in the Independent, OpenAI admitted that their latest version of ChatGPT “would encourage users’ behavior, making it ‘overly flattering or agreeable’.  Some users had pointed to the fact that the system would encourage users to stop important medical treatment, for instance.”  OpenAI said “it had built the system to ‘reflect our mission and be useful, supportive, and respectful of different values and experience’. But ‘each of these desirable qualities like attempting to be useful or supportive can have unintended side effects’.”  In Psychology Today’s article, “Forget Niceness – Just Be Kind,” author Michelle Quirk cited some “key points”: “Kindness isn’t synonymous with niceness”; “You never have to be cruel to be kind”; and “Kindness means recognizing the full humanity of another person.”  Quirk added that “Kindness requires empathy in a way that doing our duty does not …. All life rests upon relationships. Kindness builds them up while meanness tears them down. To be kind you must have courage, for that’s what gives us the strength to do the right thing and be a good person. It is kindness, a thing that is within our power to enact, that is good for everyone.”  And she quoted Aldous Huxley, who “summed up the importance of kindness this way: ‘People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is—just be a little kinder’.” 

Kevin Ellerton wrote in “Nice vs. Kind,” an article from Meditations Magazine, “People often use the words ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ interchangeably, assuming that they’re ‘basically the same thing’. The truth is, the difference between nice vs kind is night & day. ‘Nice’ is a self-centered behavior pattern, where you are acting in a “pleasing” manner, to ‘be a nice person,’ and get people to like you. ‘Kind’ is an other-centered behavior pattern, where you’re acting in the best interests of others, out of a sense of love, empathy, and compassion …. So let’s start with some definitions! Here’s the best set I could find on the Internet: ‘Nice: adj; pleasant or pleasing or agreeable in nature or appearance; socially or conventionally correct; refined or virtuous.  Kind: adj; having or showing a tender and considerate and helpful nature; used especially of persons and their behavior; characterized by mercy, and compassion.”  Ellerton has strong opinions about niceness: “A person who feels ‘weaker’ than another has an evolutionary imperative to be ‘nice, in order to gain the favor of the stronger person …. This is a very deeply ingrained evolutionary behavior, which is shared not only with our primate cousins, but with a wide variety of other mammals as well.”  Kindness, however, “arises from the basic human instinct to support life, and oppose death. This is what we call ‘compassion’, or the basic human attribute of ‘Good’ (as opposed to ‘Evil).  Kindness isn’t limited to ‘helping others’; one can be kind to one’s self as well.”

That’s where Dorothy Parker ran into trouble.  Actually, her troubles started earlier.  When she was four in 1897 her mother died, her stepmother followed soon thereafter, her beloved uncle, Martin Rothschild, died on the Titanic in 1912, and her father passed the next year.  She quit school at 14 and seven years later sold her first poem.  Soon she was an editor at Vogue before replacing P.G. Wodehouse as Vanity Fair’s drama critic, the first female critic on Broadway.  She married and divorced, but continued writing poetry for numerous magazines and newspapers and quickly developed a reputation for witty, often scathing, turns of phrase.  In 1919 Parker helped found the Algonquin Round Table, along with Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, and Edna Ferber.  The group was also known as the “Vicious Circle” where caustic wit, humor, and intellectual commentary were esteemed.

Parker also wrote short fiction and won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story, “The Big Blonde.”  She remarried soon thereafter, and the couple moved to Hollywood where they became well-remunerated screenwriters.  The Dorothy Parker Society’s biography of her reported that “they labored for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947 and remarried in 1950.  Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband died of an overdose.”  Three years later “Parker was found dead of heart disease in her apartment …. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination some months later, the estate was turned over to the NAACP.”  She had kindness in her, but being a lifelong self-deprecating alcoholic, she certainly was not kind to herself.

When you get down to it, the Golden Rule, the fundamental tenet of all major religions and creeds, boils down to “Be Kind,” a teaching many people advocate but don’t practice.  As Irish poet John Boyle O’Reilly wrote, “Then within my bosom Softly this I heard: ‘Each heart holds the secret, Kindness is the word’.”