In today's Post:

Emotion fractured Harrington's voice as he talked about the exonerated man. Harrington now keeps a photo of Gates that he downloaded from the Internet in a frame over his desk. Also on the desk is a letter he received from Gates after he was released. It reads:

"Rev. Harrington, I forgive you. I forgave you a long time ago. Now I consider you my friend. Your brother in Christ, Donald."

The greatest math movie of all-time, as anyone knows, is Donald (Duck) in Mathmagic Land. The second greatest math movie of all-time is Stand and Deliver. (I wish to apologize personally to Jennifer Connelly for not ranking A Beautiful Mind in these top spots. Jen, call me.) If you agree, maybe because Stand and Deliver helped you believe you could rise to the occasion in high school calc class, all practice tests to the contrary, you need to read how Jaime Escalante is fighting cancer and Edward James Olmos is raising funds for him. A PDF details how you can help.

CBS talks to Escalante:

It came inside a little box stuffed with packing peanuts inside a bigger box stuffed with packing peanuts and covered with red FRAGILE labels. Inside, foam strips filled the bulb and ended in "Pull with care" stickers. I unplugged the bulb's penny-topped stopper and the green arrived.

"Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts," the Guardian says. Their answers come in two parts, both worth reading and both stuffed with thoughts applicable to all writing (beyond fiction) and, in some ways, to life.

Leonard's starter list is good. At #4, we get: "Never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said' … he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances 'full of rape and adverbs.' "

Following are my favorite 10 rules from the Guardian's collection of lists. Have a look at the lists and online or offline tell me your favorites.

Margaret Atwood
"6. Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B."

Roddy Doyle
"1. Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."

Geoff Dyer
"6. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

Jonathan Franzen
"2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money."

Neil Gaiman
"5. Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

Hilary Mantel
"5. Be aware that anything that appears before 'Chapter One' may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there."

Michael Moorcock
"9. Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery)."

Michael Morpurgo
"1. The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time."

Andrew Motion
"3. Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary."

Joyce Carol Oates
"4. Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and 'obscure' – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing."

And bonus Franzen: "10. You have to love before you can be relentless."

The sky was so clear Saturday morning that I could see buildings I'd never seen before in the distance. The Cathedral, at right below, was already a long ways from Courthouse, but the new buildings sat even further. Were they on the hills of Connecticut Avenue? Or Silver Spring even, just past D.C. height restrictions? Or something else entirely?

Was in Silver Spring for breakfast that morning (with awesome Daily people) but couldn't ID anything. And kind of doubted the buildings I'd seen were that far away. Anyone have any ideas or answers here?

With my camera's zoom maxed out:

Update: Friend Katey appears to have it, in the comments.

I have this friend who loves words, and she knows how to carry them. They aren't the annoying 10-centers. They fit fantastically upon arrival. They roll off her tongue, jump unannounced into sentences and never apologize as they fly across the street. I talk with her, and I feel I'm a step behind and have to break stride and sprint to keep up. It's cool.

So, two of the best movies I've seen recently were word movies. The first was Brick, the 2005 high school noir. I'd heard good things about the film when it first came out, but seeing director Rian Johnson's fun Bloom Brothers follow-up and then Joseph Gordon-Levitt's work in 500 Days of Summer piqued my Netflix list. It didn't disappoint. Keeping up with the lines, half invented slang, was difficult but rewarding. Like:

No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we're doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit.

Or:

See the Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin.

But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said "Show your hands" if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets.

The other movie with the words was Charade, and the play there was in the back-and-forth of the dialogue. How could Grant and Hepburn only have done one movie together? "Best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made" — absolutely. Turned up the volume to catch everything.

Peter: We don't know each other, do we?

Regina: Why? Do you think we're going to?

Peter: I don't know, how would I know?

Regina: Because I already know an awful lot of people and until one of them dies, I couldn't possibly meet anyone else.

Peter: Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.

"Lucas!"
"Joe!"
"Where's the money?"
"Joe, the money is gone."
"Yeah, I know it's gone… but where's it gone to?"
"Atlantic City."
"Atlantic City? … Is it coming back from Atlantic City?"
"Oh, I don't think so, Joe."
"What's it doing in Atlantic City, Lucas?"
"Recirculating."

Photos from a Saturday night discovery:

From the terrific Times profile of new Xerox CEO Ursula Burns comes a different idea. What do you owe a company as your career develops?

And if you ask her for a new assignment, a promotion into a new role, you’re likely to hear the speech she first heard long ago from Mr. Hicks about “getting to zero” with a job.

To explain, she picks up a piece of paper and draws a line across it. She shades an area below the left end of the line.

“When you start the job, whatever it is, you have to find out who the secretary is, where the bathrooms are, who your teammates are,” she says. “Trust me, for a lot of time you are operating below zero.”

She then points to the middle stretch of the line.

“This is when most people want to leave a job,” she adds. “They say: ‘I’m done. I know everything. I’m done.’ But think about that. If you left there, basically all this area under the curve, which is negative, which is take-away, you owe the company all of that. Then you do this for six more months, and you can operate the place smoothly, but you haven’t really transformed it in the ways that you can help to transform it.”

She starts shading an area above the line to the right. That represents what a manager is expected to contribute — what to give back — after absorbing all of the training and experience that exists below the left side of the line. The balance amounts to “getting to zero.”

We begin…

As only brothers can pose.

Cousins, just before the picture.

A second later, the picture!

We conclude, baptized…

Then, afterward, pictures in the gown my grandmother was baptized in more than a century ago and onto cousin Kate and Stefan's house for so much good food (I ran the table on the desserts), me running out of battery, and talk of Olympics, snow and potential trips to Pago Pago.

Yesterday brought trip #4 to Ray's Hell Burger and my third burger off the house-special list, The Dogcatcher. A description is short but clearly hard-driving: "Roasted Bone Marrow, Persillade, Lettuce and Tomato."

Persillade is just seasoning, Google tells me. Bone marrow, Wikipedia says, "has fallen out of favor as a food in the United States." The brief "bone marrow as food" section manages to pass without a description of taste. To take a stab at one here… Hell Burger's bone marrow looks like a jam made of crab meat, tastes like a butter sauce that magically lightens a burger's flavor, and sounds like you have to go down to the junkyard, throw down your dogcatching net and fight snout to snout.

Or, as America's most famous bone marrow-eatin' literature declaims:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau concludes we bear a "strange uncertainty" about whether life comes from the devil or from God and "somewhat hastily" decide to go with God. Yesterday's burger — yesterday's Hell Burger — was similar.

The only failure of the trip? No photos. Four times now, I have taken a camera and planned to capture my Ray's burger. And four times, I have forgotten. Eyes and gut have consistently beaten mind and processes. Unphotographed so far are the Burger of Seville in late 2008, a regular in September, a Soul Burger No. 1 in January, and now the Dogcatcher.

Seven specialty burgers to go at Ray's. Next — the Let's Get It On?