IT MAY BE A LITTLE WORLD BUT ITS A WHALE OF A UNIVERSE.

Scientists tell us that light travels some six million miles in a year. That tidy little figure is the equivalent of the astronomer's "light-year".

But the light-year has become too small a unit with which to measure the distance between us and some of the stars, so the "kiloparsec" has been invented. A "kiloparsec" represents four thousand light-years more or less or some twenty-thousand-million-million miles!

But such figures do not stump these scientists who point their glasses down instead of up. They deal in atoms and electrons. Twenty thousand million million electrons wouldn't make a good sized Chigger. The ancient Bard who once said, "Big flees have little flees upon their backs to bit them", "And little flees have lesser flees and so on 'ad finitum', wasn't so very far off either actually or figuratively.

THE SHORTEST POEM

We like poetry but we cannot stand it in too large doses. The following, which according to its author, Strickland Gillilan, is the shortest poem existing, deals with the antiquity of "bugs". It runs thus:

"Adam had em!"