In today’s Classic Column on “If I hadn’t killed 52 flies as a child … etc.”, Cecil states the size of our galaxy as only 25-30 parsecs across. Well, unless he was talking about it’s thickness, the measure should have read 25-30 kiloparsecs.
(1 parsec = 3.26 light years, Milky Way galaxy ~100,000 light years across, you can check my math.)
That, or the gib gnab is close at hand. 
I can’t believe I’m the first person to spot this in a 28 year old column - the news could have crossed the galaxy by now 