Yesterday, following a link on AC, I read an anecdote from an Epstein girl who said she had been ordered to give a particular celebrity a foot massage, but this person's feet were so disgusting that she insisted on washing them first. This particular celebrity is not accused of anything beyond that, but obviously people are going to be skeptical of the idea that he was on the Lolita Express just for the footrubs.
Shortly after that, I listened to the second part of a YouTube debate with Leo Ebbert and others on the subject of Joseph Smith and polygamy:
More than once in the course of the debate, the idea came up of foot-washing as implying sexual activity. Apparently some non-Mormon sect of the day taught that couples should wash each other's feet before doing the deed, and at one point it was proposed that "Washed our feet and went to bed" in a journal entry implied that something sexual had taken place.
Today, I started reading The Fortress, the third novel in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. About a quarter of the way into it, we discover that one of the characters is a polygamist, many of whose wives appear to be underage. When wife number eight, who Niall guesses is a pre-teen, is introduced, she asks her husband, "Shall I wash your feet now?"
So that's three times in two days, in three completely different contexts, that I ran into foot-washing in connection with polygamous and/or underage sex.
In Taichung today, I stopped at an intersection where there were, opposite one another, two shops with English names selling caffeinated beverages: John Tea and Louisa Coffee. This struck me as significant for some reason I couldn't put my finger on -- perhaps something to do with John Dee, I thought. I didn't get a chance to take a photo, but here it is on Street View:
When I got home, I read William Wright's latest post, "'Louise has weapon': Arrival, language, and power." The name Louise got my attention, obviously. The reference is to the 2016 movie Arrival, which I recently watched and mentioned in a post, in which an alien language is deciphered by a linguist named Louise and her partner, Ian. Louise and Louisa are forms of the same name, as are Ian and John. Here's a sample of what the alien language looks like:
And here's one of the first image search results for coffee stain:
William discusses my recent post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," in which I was asked in a dream "Do you know what a week is?" and replied with a little verse defining it in terms of the phases of the moon:
From none to half, or half to all,
Or all to half, or half to none
Takes seven days, and this we call
A week, and now my tale is done.
William says that, since the dream had no visual component, the question might actually have been about weak, or even the Elvish word wiqe, which means "penis." The latter is a bit of a stretch, since the Elvish word would be pronounced "wee-kway" and wouldn't really sound like week, but the general point is that homophones -- whether within one language or across languages -- introduce ambiguity and the potential for misunderstanding.
I didn't mention it in my post, but I had actually thought something very similar just after my dream -- not about the word week but about the ending of the verse: my tale is done.
The Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle begins with a scene in which Dor is writing an essay for school, having pressed into service a "spelling bee" -- a magical insect which is "incapable of misspelling a word, however much it might wish to, to spite him." Dor dictates his essay to the bee, only to discover later that its spite has found a loophole, giving what are technically correct spellings, but of homophones, not of the words Dor clearly intended. The final essay begins with "Eye live inn the Land of Xanth, witch is disstinked from Mundania" and ends with "My tail is dun."
The dream reminded me of this episode, so much so that when I typed it up for the blog post, I inadvertently wrote "my tail is dun" and had to go back and correct it.
After writing most of the above, I took a break to do some housework. While I did so, I listened to a debate on YouTube about whether or not Joseph Smith had practiced polygamy. (William Wright had sent me the link, and his friend Leo Ebbert is one of the participants.)
In the debate, Mark Tensmeyer and Jacob Vidrine argue for the position that Joseph Smith was a practicing polygamist, while Leo Ebbert and Jeremy Hoop argue that he was not. In Leo's closing remarks, he repeatedly uses the expression "Heads I win, tails you lose" to characterize the methods of his opponents. Immediately after that, Jeremy gives his closing remarks, in which he states that "there simply is no evidence" of Joseph's polygamy. "There's only tales of it."
Among Mormons, of course, the name Dunn is closely associated with tall tales.
