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In 1993 I was a junior in high school, studying The Canterbury Tales. We were given an assignment to write a Chaucerian sonnet from the point of view of an elevator operator whose elevator gets stuck between floors while a group of high school students is on a field trip. I chose to write about a debate student, and I had a specific senior in mind. I chose to spell debater with an -or because I felt that made it seem more a part of his identity.

Sometime around the turn of the century, my parents and I met up at my sister's house in Pittsburgh for Christmas. 'Becca lives in Squirrel Hill, a very ethnically diverse neighborhood, and just a block from her house I found a Belarusian import store. I was unfamiliar with Belarusian imports, so I took my time looking at them and trying to identify whether the customers were speaking with the proprietor in Russian or some other language. It sounded close enough that I thought I could put my college Russian to use.

I was a little vague in January when we wrote up our annual letter, and I left out some important details. The revised version is attached.

When I was a teenager, for whatever reason one of my favorite summertime activities was to go out on the country roads east of Bartlesville and pick up recyclables. I called it "canpicking."  I would generally do this on a bicycle, and usually alone, but sometimes I brought friends. We'd hang bulging bags of cans and bottles from the handlebars, and if we crushed the cans tightly enough, we could sell enough at the recycling center in Dewey to afford a can of pop for the return trip. (We rarely brought any water with us, even in the peak of summer.)

Music & lyrics by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. Autoharp arrangement by Ben Stallings.

Note: The final verse of this song is supposed to be a half-step higher than the first two. However, the only major keys my autoharp has that are half a step apart are E and F, and I don't have all the necessary chords to play it in E. So what I have notated instead is F to G, going up a whole step on the last note of the bridge.

• A Russian-American comedian I heard on BBC world service a few minutes ago was just saying how in the Soviet Union, when someone important died they would broadcast Swan Lake for 24 hours on all stations with no explanation, causing everyone who lived through it to develop a pavlovian stress response to the music. So here I am a few minutes later minding my own business, and what starts playing in the next room? Daaaaaa da da da da daaaaaa da daaaaaa...

When I worked for the Friends of MPL, I rode the bus most of the time. Bicycling through downtown was always a little nerve-wracking, and although I had a pass to park in the employee bike parking complete with locker room and shower, in the library's temporary location that was down in a sub-basement of the heavily fortified former Federal Reserve building. Biking down the steep ramp through the giant motorized blast-resistant doors (4" solid steel!

This shape represents the mathematical function y = x raised to the x power, where x is a real number but y is complex.

The model was printed on the Dimension 3-dimensional printer.

For further information about this shape, continue reading below.

When you learn trigonometry, you learn a lot about the properties of triangles. But such understanding can lead to even more questions. This article will explore some interesting properties of triangles whose sides are integers.