...a pig through a/the python...

A lovely trope, encountered in Ian Parker's article on PowerPoint in The New Yorker May 28 2001, in a quotation from Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems:
 Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: if I want to tell my forty thousand employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is forty-eight bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put the same word in a PowerPoint slide and it becomes 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net. (pg. 86)
...so I went looking for other occurrences, mostly to see the contexts in which it appears, and found these among others:
 due to the Baby Boomers moving through the demographic chart like a pig through a python
(bandersnatch.com/crs.htm --and many others too)

These babies then moved over time like a pig through a python, causing periodic bouts of indigestion (the 'classroom', 'Vietnam', and 'job-glut' crises)
(www.compusearch.ca/PSYTEUS%20Desc.asp)

Moving the Pig Through the Python: Multiple Approaches to Resolving Case Management Problems in Toxic Tort Litigation
(www.law.duke.edu/lib/bibliographies/mcgovern.html)

Getting in and out of Shaw Place early in the morning is a lot like pushing a pig through a python
(www.sptimes.com/Archive/112400/Northoftampa.shtml)

Sometimes, when he described his impression of IBM's speed in moving technology to the marketplace, he said, "It's slower than moving a pig through a python."
(home.stny.rr.com/wniehoff/apl/graphpakchron.htm)

"It just ripples through the system like a pig through a python. And if you blink, your competitor is going to do ... "
(www.foodlogistics.com/archives/sept00/sept00-gma.html)

they are passing through the company "like a pig through a python," and the bulge has just been in the customer service end of things. ...
(ntr.net/info/newinfo/mindspring.htm)

...and not for the faint-hearted (thanks to Chris Sullivan)