I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Random Acts of Poetry, Part III Another reign has come and gone, and as chronicled in the past (not once but twice) I was called upon to write an introductory sonnet for a couple competing in the tourney to determine the heirs. I asked Lord Duncan Chaucer and Lady Anneleyn Cornelisse if they wanted anything in particular mentioned, and it was suggested that Anneleyn's general A&S coolness and Duncan's peacock tendencies might be nice to include. I thought about that for a while, and when I hit on the idea of the peacock and the nightengale as a central image, the sonnet fell into place fairly quickly. I wanted to work one quatrain about them both, and then another for each alone, then wrap it up in the closing couplet. The peacock and the nightengale came forth A parliament of fowls made up of two To show at coronet their mighty worth To try and spread their wings o'er pastures new Fair Annelyne, the nightengale, whose song, Enlivens and makes happy those who hear, Whose graceful dancing lets no foot go wrong, With gentle and good nature now draws near. The peacock Duncan Chaucer for her strives To place her on a throne his goal this day What joy will come if his endeavour thrives And they be Prince and Princess of the May. The fencer and the artist start to sing The nightengale and peacock now take wing I was particularly amused by the second line A parliament of fowls made up of two As 'The Parliament of Fowls' (or Parlement of Foules, etc.) is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, so I was able to slip a little play on Duncan's name into the sonnet. I would have done it for that reason alone, but as it turns out, the poem features birds choosing their mates, and as this couple are soon to be wed, it is oddly appropriate. The British Library has a post about the poem since (of course), they have it in manuscript ...

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