By day, she handles books.  By night, she chases leads.  A killer of women had been identified at a press conference in 2017, and the name was repeated later in a podcast by New Hampshire Public Radio:  Terry Peder Rasmussen.  The name held different meanings for two people involved.  Rebekah Heath’s online connection was a woman searching for a long-lost baby, a relative named Sarah McWaters, not seen in more than 40 years.  Sarah’s mother, Marlyse Honeychurch, was also missing, Heath learned, after disappearing from California in 1978.  Further, this online connection said the last person known to have had contact with the mother and daughter, plus two other missing girls, was a man named Terry Rasmussen.  Heath, a librarian from Simsbury, Conn., knew her independent work trying to help police identify four people--a woman and three girls found dead years ago and years apart in Allenstown, near Bear Brook State Park--had paid off.  These four unsolved murders moved in and out of the public consciousness through the decades.  A reporter would revisit now and then, check on progress, see if there had been any developments in a case that had proved frustrating for so many for so long.  Heath scoured missing-children posts.  Monthly subscriptions to Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and lots of newspapers opened doors.  “She got Rasmussen’s name from a podcast at the same time we were doing our investigative and genealogy work,” Associate Attorney General Jeff Strelzin told me during a phone interview.  “It all came together at the same time.”  Strelzin said his office and law enforcement, in general, didn’t mind that a private citizen assisted in their effort to create at least some closure for families.  Ray Duckler  https://www.concordmonitor.com/Amateur-detective-busted-open-Allenstown-murder-case-26115785



Recalling Dayton’s famous sons by Mark Bernstein  In 1911 Wilbur Wright was asked the secret to success.  Simple, he replied:  “Choose good parents, and be born in Ohio.”  When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Americans started spilling over the Appalachians, Ohio was the only adjacent place where slavery had been banned.  It therefore drew to it people and groups who intended to place their stamp on the future.  It was a fertile ground for small colleges and utopian communities.  While the former colonies along the Atlantic still looked back to Europe, Ohio was the first place that looked to the ever-beckoning West.  https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/opinion/perspective-looking-back-the-more-imaginative-wright-brother/IcvvgZVAQ6QDM4cSoQ0YvL/



Famous for being famous is a pejorative term for someone who attains celebrity status for no particularly identifiable reason (as opposed to fame based on achievements, skill, or talent) and appears to generate his or her own fame, or someone who achieves fame through a family or relationship association with an existing celebrity.  Similar terms are famesque and celebutante.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_for_being_famous



Hermann Hagedorn (1882–1964) was an American author, poet and biographer.  He was born in New York City and educated at The Hill School and Harvard University, where he was awarded the George B. Sohier Prize for literature, the University of Berlin, and Columbia University.  From 1909 to 1911, he was an instructor in English at Harvard.  Hagedorn was a friend and biographer of Theodore Roosevelt.  He also served as Secretary and Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association from 1919 to 1957.  Drawing upon his friendship with Roosevelt, Hagedorn was able to elicite the support of Roosevelt's friends and associates' personal recollections in his biography of TR which was first published in 1918 and then updated in 1922 and which is oriented toward children.  The book has a summary questions for young readers at the end of each chapter.  Drawing on the same friends and associates of Roosevelt, Hagedorn also published the first serious study of TR's experience as a rancher in the Badlands after the death of his wife and mother in 1884.  Hagedorn's access to TR's associates in these two books has been utilized by historian, Edmund Morris in his two highly acclaimed biographical books on Roosevelt published in 1979 and 2001.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Hagedorn



Pluots, apriums, apriplums, or plumcots, are some of the hybrids between different Prunus species that are also called interspecific plums.  Whereas plumcots and apriplums are first-generation hybrids between a plum parent (P. salicinaor P. cerasifera or their hybrids) and an apricot (P. armeniaca), pluots and apriums are later-generations.  Both names "plumcot" and "apriplum" have been used for trees derived from a plum seed parent, and are therefore equivalent.  See plumcot, pluot and aprium varieties plus pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluot  Cotton-candy grapes and Cosmic Crisp are other designer fruits. 



Words for nether garments all seem to have been commonly plural throughout their history, often prefixed by pair of . . . breeches, shorts, drawers, panties, tights, knickers (short for knickerbockers), and trousers.  Pants is short for pantaloons, also plural, which in their very earliest incarnations were nearer stage tights; their name comes from a Venetian character in Italian commedia dell’arte who was the butt of the clown’s jokes and who always appeared as a foolish old man wearing pantaloons.  Commentators referred to them when they first appeared as being a combination of breeches and stockings.  Later the word was applied to fashionable tight-fitting trousers.  Trousers came into the language in the seventeenth century from the Gaelic trowse, a singular word for a slightly different garment rather more like breeches; a later version of it was trews, taken to be a plural because of the final s.  Breeches has been plural throughout its recorded history, a long one (it dates from at least the year 1200).  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pai1.htm  Other words that seem to be always used as plurals are alms and qualms.



Based on his own experiences as an immigrant and his knowledge of the slums as a police reporter, Jacob Riis advocated for practical solutions to a wide array of social problems.  Through lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, and books like How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892), Riis worked tirelessly to influence public opinion.  He met with a hostile reception from New York City’s powerful political machine, Tammany Hall, whose leaders saw well-meaning, middle-class reformers as a threat to their influence.  But in 1894, an anti-Tammany reform candidate, William L. Strong, won the mayor’s office and instituted a period of “good government” policies.  Among Strong’s appointments was a young Theodore Roosevelt as police commissioner.  Roosevelt befriended Riis and supported his causes, as Riis advocated for the destruction of the worst of the old tenements, the construction of parks, education for children, and the closing of the dangerous police station lodging houses.  https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/reformer.html  Jacob August Riis, (born 1849 in Ribe, Denmark—died 1914 in Barre, Massachusetts), was an American newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer.



PARAPHRASES from A Poisoned Mind, Trish Maguire book 9 by Natasha Cooper  *  On each plate was a plump partridge sitting on its little cushion of cabbage, belly pork and chipolata.  *  I've gone all childish--I need  treats and tributes to keep me happy.  *  Family reasons is a wonderful catch-all excuse for moving from one job into a less prominent one.  *



Natasha J. Cooper (born 1951 in Kensington, London) is an English crime fiction writer.  See list of books including those written under aliases at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Cooper



overstand  From Middle English overstonden, from Old English oferstandan (“to stand over”), equivalent to over- +‎ stand.  Cognate with Dutch overstaan (“to stand over”), German überstehen (“to stand through, survive”).  verb  overstand (third-person singular simple present overstands, present participle overstanding, simple past and past participle overstood)  (rare) to stand or insist too much or too long; overstay quotations ▼  (transitive) to stand too strictly on the demands or conditions of.  (yachting, boat racing): to sail to the mark at a wider angle than is the normal upwind angle, to go beyond the layline  (forestry, of a coppice): To be neglected and left uncut for too long. quotations ▼ noun  overstand (plural overstands)  (lutherie) The measurement between the top plate and the fingerboard where the neck meets the body of the instrument.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overstand



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2162  September 30, 2019