flossing the cat

When I was a kid, I used to love space hoppers.   Or, to borrow modern-day parlance, I used to heart them.  I loved their weird, rabbity, scrunched-up faces; their funny, whimsical, gormlessness. I loved their plump orange bodies, and their ribbed little ears, and the smell and feel of them, and the way they lay there, on your lawn, all forlorn-looking. But, as always, shit happens. Or, as the philosopher and visionary thinker Samuel L Jackson famously put it, snakes on a plane man, snakes on a plane!  And now, the sad fact of the matter is that I fucking hate space hoppers. I do not heart them AT ALL.   In short, those orange FATSOS are on my shit list. It was a love affair that ended suddenly, traumatically, at my daughter’s ninth birthday party. The party - billed by our host venue, the local Bowlplex, as the Ultimate Birthday Bash - started well enough, with unlimited bowling, ‘sharing’ party platters, and a ‘glow bowling’ disco atmos...