O Woe is Me . . . But You've Got to Be Cruel to Be Kind

We were in Act IV of Hamlet today, right after Hamlet blindly slaughters Polonius, chops up his body, and scatters the pieces in the castle-- Hamlet is then confronted about this grisly situation, and he glibly explains to King Claudius that "Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots," and so I played the bit of The Lion King when Mufasa explains to Simba about the whole "Circle of Life" and asked what Mufasa skips-- it's all the decay and decomposition-- and we got to talking about maggots for a moment and I told them a college tale about when my buddy Rob put a half-eaten roast beef sandwich on a filthy table, threw a newspaper over it, and there it remained . . . and two weeks later, when I picked up the newspaper-- looking for the crossword puzzle-- instead of a roll full of roast beef, there was now a roll full of writhing maggots; one of the students said, "They grew there because of the meat, right?" and a few other students seemed to agree with this hypothesis, so I had to stop the presses, press pause on the teaching of literature, and start teaching science-- luckily, another student had paid attention in Bio class and explained to the class that the Theory of Spontaneous Generation had been refuted in the 19th century and that we now know that mice don't magically spring from bales of hay and maggots are the larval form of flies.