Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!

Thomas B. Marsh, the relatively obscure Mormon historical figure is in the air. Leo has posted on him extensively at his blog ("The Curious Case of Thomas B. Marsh" and "Thomas B. Marsh: Alternate Ending #1" so far, and I assume that "#1" means there's more where that came from), and William Wright picked up the theme with "Swampy Key Holders: Pokelogan and Thomas B. Marsh." My own sync-stream has featured such marsh-adjacent content as pokelogan (a kind of marsh) and a novel called Swamplandia!, but I haven't posted anything about Thomas B. himself -- until now.

Ever since I watched that Don Bradley Liahona thing, YouTube has decided that Ward Radio (a loud and goofy Mormon podcast, not that there's anything wrong with that) is my kind of thing, so today at the top of my suggested videos was something called "Thomas B. Marsh is Getting OUT OF CONTROL!" (shouting in the original) -- about how suddenly everyone's hearing about him. The whole video is basically a response to this comment:

I just have to say, I NEVER heard the Thomas B Marsh bucket of cream story until I started listening to this podcast. Now I've heard it about 5,000 times.

Here it is. It's worth listening to at least part of it just to hear Cardon Ellis pulling one Biden after another. First it's "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of story" (a smaller-scale version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories?), and then he actually calls him Thomas B. Bucket, which I think was one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Thomas B. Marsh -- who supposedly left the Church over a dispute about a bucket of milk -- is one of the go-to examples of people leaving the Church for stupid reasons. I heard the story countless times growing up Mormon. The other overused story with this moral is that of Symonds (Simonds?) Ryder (Rider?), who is supposed to have left the Church because Joseph Smith misspelled (or did he?) his name. As I was listening to Cardon holding forth on Thomas B. Bucket and his bucket of story, my mind melded the two stories together and created something new.

First, though, I know my readers are a pretty cultured lot, but if you have somehow never seen the classic Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-Shirts," you should watch that right now before proceeding.

Anyway, the scene that spontaneously emerged in my mind went something like this:

"No, no, I'm sorry. That says Thomas B. Shawarma. You see, Marsh is M-A-R-S-H. I think you made some kind of mistake."

"Heh-heh-heh. I never make mistakes."

"No, but you see there's no such person as Thomas B. --"

Enter the Fat Blue Anything Muppet. "Hi. I'm Thomas B. Shawarma. Is my T-shirt ready?"

Yes, I know shawarma isn't an anagram of Marsh, but that's just what appeared, okay? -- fully-formed, as it were, like Athena from the headwaters of the Suez. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.

Sync: The sexual implication of foot-washing

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.

My tail is dun

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.