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

[Joel Deutsch]

Albert,

I agree. My feeling wasn't that it was all that esoteric, just that Pogue 
was making a good joke and for some reason it was going over my head because 
I'd forgotten the place it was coming from. I read his column every week, 
actually I get it delivered via email as one of my newsletter services from 
mytimes.com, so I have a pretty good feel for his personality, at least his 
columnist's personality, and that fits just fine, now that I figured out the 
origin of the humorous allusion.

So it goes.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "albert griffith" <albertgriffith at sbcglobal.net>
To: "'NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List'" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 2:04 PM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Origins/joke (a thought digression on Re: One 
numberto ring them all)


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


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