Originally posted by guntownuncle:
In Gonzales some folks call it Guntown. I guess because of the "Come & Take It" cannon, and also Gonzales tends to be pronounce Gunzales. The uncle part is because I was only an uncle when I first started using it as a screen name on other sites.
Hey, I've fired the cannon in Gonzales. Actually the one at the mission. As they said, the only cannon to be shipped to Gonzales by UPS.
My screen name is from a computer program. It was going to predict the weather over Vietnam for the Air Force. They were going to use a computer called the Illiac 4. This was before chaos theory, and during the era of anti-war demonstrations. They moved the coomputer from the University of Illinois to Lawrence Livermore Labs, and never really got it working again, from what I understand.
So I originally picked it because I was amused by the technical ignorance and arrogance of it all.
Now the computer program was named after an element from Norse mytholgy.
Here's what wikipedia says:
In Norse mythology, Gleipnir (Old Norse "open one"[1]) is the binding that holds the mighty wolf Fenrisulfr (as attested in chapter 34 of the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning). Even though it is as thin as a silken ribbon, it is stronger than any iron chain. It was forged by the dwarves in their underground realm of Svartálfaheim, and made of six ingredients:
The sound of a cat's footfall
The beard of a woman
The roots of a mountain
The sinews of a bear
The breath of a fish
The spittle of a bird
Thus we no longer hear a cat's footfall, women have no beards, mountains have no roots, bears no sinews, fish no breath, and birds no spittle.
Gleipnir, having bound the Fenrisúlfur securely, was the cause of Týr's lost arm, for the Fenrisulfr bit it off when he was not freed. Gleipnir is said to hold until Ragnarök, when it will break and Fenrir will devour Odin.
So maybe I'm holding off the end of the world with somewhat unorthodox techniques?
