...at an execution is the mass murderer, you know something isn't going well.
[that guy on the Daily Show, quoted approximately, because I can't find a transcript.]
But the quote that's so obvious that everyone must have been citing it, and only an international conspiracy can account for my not having seen it mentioned once in the masses of commentary, is
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
[Macbeth, Act I scene iv]
However, Ms Four Sigma, whose wisdom in these matters is sometimes delayed by the salutary practice of avoiding the news, noted another text:
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd.
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
[Hamlet, Act III, scene iii]
Fortunately, we don't share those old superstitions about the moment at which a person is killed. Does Moqtada al-Sadr?
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