When I was in grad school about 30 years ago (seems more like 100) I'd left a glass of scotch out on the coffee table overnight, then got up the next morning to find there was a fly lying face down in the whisky. And my first thought was "Oh, what a tragedy but what a way to go" and I fished the fly out of the drink, set it on the table and continued drinking. My housemate got up, and we were discussing this. How long is a housefly's lifespan? A few weeks or so?
And then, a half hour later or so it turned out the fly hadn't drowned or died of alcohol poisoning, it was just... inert, I guess. And it started flopping around on the table. At first just trying to walk on six legs, eventually trying to achieve liftoff. My friend and I were fascinated by this. It was clearly drunk or something, but recovering fairly quickly. It got airborne, in short hops at first, then buzzing about the living room but no higher than about 4 feet off the ground, so we started discussing proportion, relativity, physics. What altitude is four feet in fly miles? What's it like to be a maggot one day and live a few weeks, what does time seem like from that perspective?
Anyway, after awhile it seemed sober enough to let out into the world at large again, so we did.
