MANHATTAN:  Houston Street is a major east-west thoroughfare in downtown Manhattan, running crosstown across the full width of the island of Manhattan, from Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive (FDR Drive) and East River Park on the East River to Pier 40 and West Street on the Hudson River.  It generally serves as the boundary between neighborhoods, with Alphabet City, the East Village, NoHo, Greenwich Village, and the West Village lying to the north of the street, and the Lower East Side, most of the Bowery, Nolita, and SoHo to the south.  The numeric street-naming grid in Manhattan, created as part of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, begins immediately north of Houston Street with 1st Street at Avenue A, although the grid does not fully come into effect until 13th Street.  The street's name is pronounced "how-stən", unlike the city of Houston in Texas, which is pronounced "hyoo-stən".  This is because the street was named for William Houstoun, whereas the city was named for Sam Houston.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Street

QUOTES from The Silent Places, #4 in the George Hastings novels by James Patrick Hunt  "Torture usually leads to the wrong information."  " I don't see the point in being mad about things."

James Patrick Hunt is an English author born in 1964.  Hunt writes mystery and thriller novels.  While a portion of his early childhood was spent in England, he eventually moved to Oklahoma, the new setting affecting his sensibilities and impacting the sorts of stories he would come to write.  Hunt graduated from Parks College of Saint Louis University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1986.  He eventually went to Marquette University Law School, leaving the institute in 1992 with a degree in law.  Find a list of Hunt's books at http://www.bookseriesinorder.com/james-patrick-hunt/

In Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill, there are clocks everywhere.  Every Congressional office suite, according to the Architect of the Capitol, has at least three clocks in it.  There are around 4,000 clocks on the House side of the Hill, and just slightly less on the Senate side.  There are fancy, old clocks, that need to be regularly wound; there are newer, decorative clocks that adorn the mantlepieces of legislators’ personal offices; and there are practical wall clocks, with wide white faces, that look a lot like the clocks in elementary school hallways and classrooms.  These thousands of clocks, though, don’t just tell the time.  They’re part of system more than a century old that sends signals, in a code of sounds and lights, to members of the House and Senate.  Look along the top of a Congressional wall clock, and you’ll see seven small light bulbs.  Even the fancier clocks in members’ offices have them.  From time to time, these will light up in particular sequences, accompanied by loud, long buzzes or series of shorter buzzes.  These patterns all have meanings:  they’re meant to communicate to people working on the Hill when electronic votes are called, when one chamber or the other is adjourned or in recess, and when members need to think about actually being in the Senate or House chamber.

Sarah Laskow  http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/congressional-clocks-have-a-secret-code

Philip James Quinn Barry (1896–1949) was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.  Barry's life as a writer started at the age of nine when he had a story called Tab the Cat published by a Rochester newspaper.  Four precocious years later, he wrote a three-act drama called No Thoroughfare, which went unproduced.  When he was at Yale, he devoted his time to writing poetry and short fiction while working for the Yale Literary Magazine.  In 1919, the Yale Dramatic Club staged his one-act play, Autonomy.  By the time he had enrolled in George Pierce Baker's playwriting course at Harvard at the end of the year, he was spending all his time writing plays.  His first full-length play for the class was A Punch for Judy, written in the spring 1921.  The Harvard workshop took "A Punch for Judy" on tour to Worcester, Utica, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Columbus, but it failed to win the backing of a New York producer.  Playwright Robert E. Sherwood met Barry at this time and thought him a "exasperating young twirp."  Sherwood would eventually become a good friend and colleague who came to appreciate what he termed Barry's "Irish, impish sense of comedy."   Many years later, Sherwood would finish writing Second Threshold, left incomplete at the time of Barry's death.  Find a list of Philip Barry's plays and a link to his papers at Georgetown University at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Barry

Marzipan  Sometimes called almond candy dough.  Almonds, sugar, glucose syrup, and water.  Gluten-free versions are available.  It can also sometimes contain egg whites.  Almond Paste  The same ingredients as marzipan, but with less sugar and almost double the amount of almonds.  Sometimes almond extract is added.  http://www.thekitchn.com/almond-paste-and-marzipan-what-46772

It was searching for the name “Jack Engle” in mid-19th-century newspapers that put Zachary Turpin on to the “warm lead” that turned into a “white hot” discovery:  A forgotten 165-year-old novel written by Walt Whitman.  Turpin, a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston, already made history last year when he discovered hitherto unknown musings on “Manly Health and Training” written by the author of "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."  That find was published online immediately by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review at the University of Iowa and was recently brought out in book form by Regan Arts.  Turpin’s database searches for the character name “Jack Engle” came up with a business card-sized literary notice for the long-titled “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle:  An Auto-Biography; in which the reader will find some familiar characters.”  The short novel--or long tale--ran over the span of six issues of the Sunday Dispatch, a Manhattan newspaper for which there are very few microfilm copies remaining.  The only extant copies of the newspaper for the issues containing the novel, in fact, are located at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  “It’s amazing to think that those six issues--bounded together in a volume in the Library of Congress archive--that’s the only existing original copy of the novel,” Turpin said. The discovery also is reviving discussions about why Whitman decided to give up writing sentimental and sensationalist fiction and became the experimental poet of democracy that we know today.  Until now, the last short story known to be written by Whitman was completed in 1848--a full seven years before Whitman self-published his first edition of "Leaves of Grass” in 1855.  The discovery of the 1852 publication of “Jack Engle” suggests that Whitman may have continued to write fiction right up to the publication of his ground-breaking book of poems.  Jeff Charis-Carlson  Read more and see pictures at http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/university-of-iowa/2017/02/20/newly-discovered-novel-shows-walt-whitman-finding-his-way-leaves-grass/98059080/

Lead vs. lede  Long ago the noun lede was an alternative spelling of lead, but now lede is mainly journalism jargon for the introductory portion of a news story—or what might be called the lead portion of the news story.  Strictly speaking, the lede is the first sentence or short portion of an article that gives the gist of the story and contains the most important points readers need to know.  http://grammarist.com/usage/lead-lede/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1697  February 24, 2017  On this date in 1582, with the papal bull Inter gravissimas, Pope Gregory XIII announced the Gregorian calendar.  On this date in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court of the United States established the principle of judicial review.  Word of the Day:  logrolling in U.S. (figuratively)  (1)  A concerted effort to push forward mutually advantageous legislative agendas by combining two items, either or both of which might fail on its own, into a single bill that is more likely to pass.  (2)  Mutual recommendation of friends' or colleagues' services or products, such as book recommendations in literary reviews.