[gui-talk] Origins/joke (a thought digression on Re: One number to ring them all)

[Joel Deutsch]

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