A Robocall from the Brand Graveyard and the Cowculator
Geoffrey from beyond the grave. The tweet below got me wondering how many pieces of semu-autonomous junk like this marketers have left strewn all over the digital airwaves over the years. This stuff (brand extensions and the like) is notoriously hard to keep track of through company transitions. Something like this is probably not a huge contract to begin with. Then it’s often executed by a third party service that may report in to a non-technical group within the company that may or may not have contract management responsibilities. It probably has only surface-level ties in to the client company’s core IT services. If the service provider doesn’t turn the service off at the end of a contract, during a liquidation, or when a contact person on the client side disappears, it can keep echoing on long after the company has folded up.
The Software-as-a-Service model has probably made this less common in the last five years years, because so many of the businesses offering services build automations that shut service off when account changes happen. There’s probably a good amount of this stuff floating around left over from the late 2000’s to the early teens though. It would make a good literary device in a novel.
A damn fine map. A tweet by co-creator Mark Frost pointed me to this hand-drawn map that @kyle_maclachlan shared on Instagram and was reproduced in Vulture.
From MacLachlan: “Two years ago, we made a journey back to a little town with some amazing Douglas Firs 🌲⛰⛰🌲 Today I wanted to share a fun part of #TwinPeaks history: to create a sense of place for the show, David Lynch drew this map of the town.”
Mark Frost, writer and co-creator to David Lynch, adds some additional context to the map’s creation: “We worked up the rough version of this over lunch at Dupar’s in Studio City. I think he [David Lynch] drew it the first time on the back of a placemat.”
The uncanny Cowculator. The software curator at the Computer History Museum, @bitsavers, shared details on this amazing early linear computing device from their collection.
From an article/brochure: “The Cowculator accurately determines the most efficient method of feeding dairy cows to produce maximum profit for the farmer. It does this by comparing, electronically, the cost and amount of feeds consumed with the amount and value of milk produced taking in to consideration the individual cow’s needs and condition, nutrients in the foodstuffs, etc. One of the most amazing features of the new computer is that it makes the decision on maximum profit feeding in just one minute per cow.“
Bitsavers’ twitter thread includes a wealth of information about this thing, including more background and brochures and a bunch of photos of the front and back ends. If you’re into computer history, this is an account you’ll enjoy following.
Bonus banana: The great Chuck D recalls the impact of one of his direct stylistic influences, maybe the coolest card in baseball history, same for those caps. It was neat to see him reacting to a great account I follow, @Super70sSports:
Those are the bananas I found for you this week. If you have thoughts to share, you can hit “reply” and your email will go only to me. You can support the weekly banana harvest and future audio-based bananas by buying me a coffee or dropping me a note.
Thank you.