Even though one of you (faithful readers) told me that my thoughts on Crazy Horse were too long, we will address this issue of size calmly and carefully, utilizing the newest edition to the fleet of Love Boats as our metaphor.

There she is, The Grand Princess: 951 feet long, 201 feet high (50 feet higher than the Statue Of Liberty, so when she comes into New York, passengers will be looking DOWN on the Statue for the first time), capable of carrying 2,600 passengers, and carrying 109,000 tons of stuff for them. She is the largest cruise ship in the world and she cost only $450,000,000 to build. She is TWICE the size of the heroic and epic-size Titanic. Twice the size. And, she is not going to be the biggest for long: Royal Caribbean is planning to launch two ships capable of carrying 3,100 passengers and 136,000 tons of stuff. There are seven theaters including The Princess Theater, seating 748 people, a dozen bars and cabarets, five swimming pools including one with a retractable ceiling, a virtual amusement park (one of the most popular sites), a discotheque with a glass sky walk, a one-third of a mile running track around the Promenade, and a chip and putt 9-hole golf course. This is not including the food, food, food that the ship serves every day: 862 pounds of shellfish (mostly lobster), 1,170 pounds of potatoes, 1,600 pounds of beef, and enough booze to fill the ocean surrounding the ship to a depth of 75 feet every day. Most of the customers are repeat customers.

And secondly, the size of things today can fool ya.

Now this is really big. Word of the discovery of the now incontrovertible fact that neutrinos have mass drew over 300 physicists and will affect theories about the formation and evolution of galaxies and -- are you ready? -- the ultimate fate of the Universe. If, as is now thought to be proven, neutrinos actually have mass, the innumerably inestimable quantity of them would drastically increase the overall mass of the Universe possibly altering the result of calculations which previously have determined the rate of its expansion from the central opening phenomenon, known obfuscatingly as the "Big Bang." John Updike poetically referred to the fetterless passage of neutrinos through the mass of the Earth as "like dust maidens down a drafty hall," but clearly if the findings of the Kamiokande Collective in Japan are true, it may be more like, "small fingers feeling their way gently down the spine of the world, tingling and touching all the vital spots, undetected like a succubus who kisses and leaves us wondering.. was it real or a dream?"

So, in the world of big and little, little is a lost concept, and bigger is getter bigger and bigger,, and the biggest thing of all becomes smaller and smaller.

So, when all the calculations are figured and the tract balls are finally at rest, a fact (feared and disputed) emerges triumphant: size is not the most important thing, it may well be the only thing.