Ok, a lame pun on the line from the Rolling Stones’ song “You can’t always get what you want”(from their 1969 album Let It Bleed), here with reference to what we know in my household as the Toucan Bowl:
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The Stones song; toucans; and the Toucan Bowl.
Singin’ with the Stones. The wonderfully outrageous album cover:
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And the relevant lyrics
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you might find
You get what you need
— altered slightly to You can get what you need, and that takes us to Toucan get what you need, which you are then free to read as Toucan, get what you need.
Toucans. From Wikipedia:
Toucans … are members of the family Ramphastidae of near passerine birds from the Neotropics. … They are brightly marked and have large often-colorful bills. The family includes five genera and about forty different species.
… Toucans are native to Southern Mexico, Central America, the northern part of South America, and the Caribbean region.
… The mascot of the Kellogg’s brand cereal Froot Loops is Toucan Sam.
Two actual toucans:
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Toucans have figured on this blog in several postings on over-sugared breakfast cereals for children, especially Kellogg’s appalling Froot Loops (with Toucan Sam as the mascot) — a topic that led of course to shirt loops, a.k.a. fruit loops, a slang clothing name with an anti-gay jab built in.
The Toucan Bowl. It has a toucan, and a parrot too, and an gorgeous array of exotic flowers. It has a metal base (pewter or pewter-like) with enameled inlays, it came from Nieman Marcus (in Stanford Shoppimg Center, I assume), and it was made in Hong Kong. Beyond those facts, its history is mysterious; I don’t even know whether it was a gift, or something Jacques and I bought together, just because we liked it so much. (If the latter, that would put it back in the years when Jacques was still competent and also living with me in California for at least part of the year (roughly 1986 through 1996.) Memory is fragile.
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