I’ve often been asked what’s behind the various forms of my cow’s head avatar. 
Back in the late 1980s, @DataMachinesCom, @atownandr, and the late Al Walton invited me to join their band, The Plywood Cattle Company, a name they’d selected as a semi-parodic shout out to an old-time band called the Highwoods String Band. Part of our appeal was Al’s washtub bass. He could actually get different notes out of a piece of clothesline attached to a broom stick and his washtub.
But another part of our appeal had to be our actual plywood cattle, painted for us by Sue Andrews, mom to banjoist @atownandr and a very talented artist in her own right. In addition to painting a number of cows for our “stackable herd,” Sue painted us each our own cow heads, complete with a caricature of the musician on the reverse. As you can see below, mine is still with me, in my office in UD Information Technologies.
@mandorichard and his cow
Behind the avatar
