[gui-talk] Origins/joke (a thought digression on Re: One number to ring them all)
Joel Deutsch
jdeutsch at dslextreme.com
Sun Mar 15 18:14:07 UTC 2009
since this subject line first appeared on the list, over a David Pogue Times
column I somehow never read before, I've been wracking my brain to think why
something about its wording sounded so eerily familiar. Vaguely, I wondered
if it might be a reworded echo of a line from Shakespeare, maybe something
the witches chant over their boiling cauldron during their famous scene in
Macbeth? Or? Or what? I couldn't get to it in my memory.
I googled, and it took a couple of tries and seeing a lot of hits having to
do with this phone service plus a few other mostly tecchie things like "one
Wiki to rule them all" before I came upon a result that was a direct
reference to J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, in which the ring Frodo is
in search of is described as "one ring to rule them all," fashioned by the
dark lord Mordor.
Well, forty years. No wonder the memory was foggy, and so the allusion
didn't hit me right away. I read one or two of the Tolkein books more than
that long ago, and if time hadn't diluted my memory a bit, the kind of
self-medication many of us were using at the time would have helped. As
Frank Zappa used to say in an anti-drug commercial, "why do you think they
call it dope?"
Ah, dear little Frodo. Wish I could have seen the nice movie they made of it
in New Zealand a few years ago. Seen, I mean, not listened to. But so it
goes. One ring to rule them all. Yes. of course. That's the ticket.
Joel
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