[gui-talk] Origins/joke (a thought digression on Re: One number to ring them all)
albert griffith
albertgriffith at sbcglobal.net
Sun Mar 15 21:04:39 UTC 2009
Given the tone of the article I can't help but believing Pogue meant that in
the way you perceived.
-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 2:14 PM
To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: [gui-talk] Origins/joke (a thought digression on Re: One number to
ring them all)
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
_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/albertgriffith%40s
bcglobal.net
More information about the GUI-Talk
mailing list