This one's for you, Mr Rumcove!
Rumcove plaintively asked during a telephone chat last week, "What the fuck's a primary?" Where to begin? I told him I'd get back to him.
Luckily, BBC News has published What is a primary? at its website here. Here's a 1 minute, 10 second video report for anyone interested who doesn't understand the process.
[published on July 5, 2006 in "The Flatland Oracles"]
For Rumcove's amendment, click here.
1. The Estuary Beat
As I have mentioned elsewhere, Mr. Rumcove and I met over the internet in 1997. We didn't talk on the phone till after we'd been exchanging daily emails for a few months. When we did speak, I was totally unprepared for the trouble I had understanding him. "I have an estuary accent," he'd said in an email. As he is very interested in accents, he went on to explain some of the characteristics of estuary English: the glottal stops, the use of "w" in place of "r" for some words and "f" in place of "th" (e.g., "Orwite" = "All right"), and a highly arbitrary tendency to drop H's. [For details, see the delightful Gary's Estuary Homepage by another native speaker].
He DIDN'T explain, because I imagine he and other English people don't notice, that another characteristic is talking at high speed and often lowering rather than raising the voice for emphasis. Though maybe that is just Mr R.
Probably everyone my age or younger has had the same dream. In this dream, you have some urgent reason to call someone. You try to dial the number and you can’t remember it. Instead of stopping to look it up, you keep dialing and dialing and dialing, getting more confused and anxious each time. In my dream, my fingers are slippery from my panicky flop sweat and the phone keys are too small. At a certain point (and this wouldn't happen in the dreams of anyone under, say, 40) the key pad disappears and turns into one of those old-fashioned dial phones, which slows things down even more.
And of course it’s worse when you’re dreaming that you’re calling from here to England because there are SO MANY MORE NUMBERS TO DIAL. A whole string of them.
Mr. Rumcove has made great progress in his life since he first posted that fateful internet ad. In those days, he was always around. His daughter was young; so he wanted to be around for her. I could always reach him too. For various reasons, he had to be on (the giant desktop version of Windows 97) during all the hours there were. E-mailing was pretty heady stuff back in the days before I had Windows (and I only had a computer at work). It was still really expensive to call England and there was something magical about writing someone a note and GETTING BACK A REPLY ALMOST INSTANTLY.
It was comforting to have a friend who never went anywhere, who answered immediately whenever I wrote, and who was as interested in his own culture as I was. Given that the friend was Rumcove, it was a bit like having a really morose guardian angel with an estuary accent.
Today reaching him is a whole different (MAJOR) undertaking. He has a cell phone ( “mobile”) to which he is apparently connected via a chip installed in his ear, but calling a person’s “mobile” still seems to me like something you should only do in an emergency, so I stick to the ‘land line,’ which he never answers. Now that he has a life, I don't want to keep him from it. I admit that at times I miss my invisible friend. Nobody else gets my joke. (Yes, I said "joke"). I have only one.
[published on August 25, 2005]
Rumcove liked Florida a lot when he visited here. He loved St. Augustine and he enjoyed visiting the small gulfside communities on the state’s west coast. He liked Daytona and expressed a wish to someday participate in Bike Week. He enjoyed the heat, the palm trees, and the sunny winter days. He liked the restaurant in Salt Creek at the mouth of the Suwannee, where we ate soft-shelled crab and gator tail because if you come here and go there, it’s the LAW. He liked the Greek village in Tarpon Springs and the sponges. He enjoyed the long boat ride we took along the Anclote river. He loved the restaurant on Cedar Key where we ate lunch sitting on a deck built out over the Gulf. I can’t remember now if we ever got around to visiting the prehistoric and enigmatic Shell Mound at Shell Mound County Park. If not, it’s a shame. And we never made it to Amelia Island or Fernandina Beach.
Continue reading "Two Floridas. One of them you know. Mr Rumcove prefers the other one." »
[published on August 15, 2005]
I met him through one of those internet websites they used to have where you could find an e-pal. Eight years ago an 'e-pal' was just the high-tech version of a penpal. Christ only knows what they have now. With all of the ways of chatting and ‘instant messaging’ that are available, I assume that nobody needs to write proper letters anymore.
Why did I want an e-pal? Without going into detail, let’s just say that it was a bleak time in my life. Note that finding an e-pal wasn’t necessarily the route (at least in those days) to ‘internet dating’ or ‘online romance.’ I wasn’t looking for either. I approached it very much in the spirit in which I decided to start a weblog; I wanted to write about things that interested me and I wanted to feel that someone was reading them.
The internet wasn’t the same sort of resource it is today for meeting people; the available sites were static and modelled after the ‘personal ad’ pages in newspapers that were a relatively new and trendy development in those days. Nothing happened instantly, even over the internet. You went to the site, read the profiles, emailed or posted a reply, and waited.
I could write a book---though I’m not going to---on the best way to go about meeting compatible souls online.
Continue reading "No Ordinary Profile: The Talented Mr. R" »
