GRGR(3) get the point?

[rj]

> 2) W.A. possibly suggests "Wolfgang Amadeus"... so maybe this connects the P-man
> to the Rossini-Beethoven stuff later on...
> 
Perhaps. Very Hanoverian though. I'd conjecture something like Walter
Albert -- good solid Anglo-Celtic names.

> also, Pointsman (as well as his up-coming epithet in slothrop's hallucination)
> sounds like an echo of Weissman...
> does anyone know the exact count of "_-man" named characters in the oeuvre? 
 
I've read somewhere that a pointsman is the guy or gal who switches the
railway track back and forth, and that there is a metaphor in this of
the Pavlovian conditioning (switching the brain neuron pathways between
those zeroes and ones) for which our good scientist has a predilection.
I once stayed up all night to watch a Danish or Schleswig-Holsteinian
movie called 'The Pointsman' to see if it was Pynchon-related. It
wasn't, I don't think, but it was a pretty weird movie nonetheless.

> 3) F.R.C.S. - don't know if this is an actual title abbrev - anyone know of one?
> ( best i could do was : Foreign Research Center Staff). phonetically it suggests
> "Frankenstein".

I've always had the suspicion that it might be Fellow of the Royal C...
(College?) of Science or Scientists or Surgeons, similar to the Royal
Society in _M&D_. I like "Frankenstein" though.

> 
> 4) multiple middle initials are kind of uncommon. TRP would have known of Paul
> A. E. M. Dirac from his physics education. 

Suggests pride, family heritage, social stature. My dad had memorised
the given names of one of the English King or Prince Edwards of the
time:
Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David
if memory serves.

best