Word: heffalump
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...YORK: It was a story larger than a Heffalump. One day Pooh and his friends Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Kanga (not Roo, he got lost in the Hundred Acre wood) got caught in the middle of a Very Big Controversy. Ten years ago, you see, a friend of Christopher Robin's gave the toys as a gift to the New York Public Library, which everyone agreed was a Perfectly Legal Thing. Everyone, that is, except Gwyneth Dunwoody, a British Member of Parliament, who said yesterday that it was high time Pooh came home. Oh bother, thought Mr. Giuliani, the Mayor...
...General Assembly of the United Nations. In real life, of course, he could do so and no one would notice, but West ignores this for the sake of his artifice. The resulting episode is thus one of the neatest bits of whimsical invention since A.A. Milne created the heffalump...
...Milne's classic, Piglet was left virtually speechless by his run-in with what he thought was the mysterious Heffalump. Now astronomers can share his bafflement as they grope for words to describe their own strange encounter. Off in the distant heavens, among a grouping of stars that the ancients called Cygnus (the Swan), they seem to have found a celestial version of a Heffalump. It is a cosmic beast of such enormous gravity that it appears to be tugging, stretching and, indeed, slowly gobbling up its giant companion, a massive star more than 20 times the size...
...harnessing of the atom to flights across the solar system, the thought of matter going down a kind of cosmic drain stretches the mind. It is totally at odds with common sense and, a cynic might say, smacks slightly of selfdelusion, if not madness. After all, the frightful Heffalump turned out to be only Pooh with his head stuck in a jar of honey...
...doubts about their very existence linger. But the current intellectual ferment about them transcends the importance of both their reality and practicality. Just by thinking on such a grand scale, humanity not only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet's Heffalump but Browning's famous declamation: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for." To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision is the ultimate lodestar...