One of my favorite bands is Sanguine Hum, which marries intricate song writing and arrangements with an absurdist streak derived from the original Canterbury scene (not for nothing was an earlier version of the band called Antique Seeking Nuns). A few years ago they released a pair of concept albums – Now We Have Light and Now We Have Power – inspired by what’s called the “buttered cat paradox.” Did I mention the absurdist streak?

The buttered cat paradox is best explained in this short video, where butter is substituted with jam, but the principle is the same:

The further step upon which the Sanguine Hum albums are based is the idea that if the cat will hover off the ground, rotating, that the rotational force could be capture as a form of generating power. As one song from the first album goes:

The simplest way to describe
What is lighting up the night’s sky
Is rotatory fur!
It spins through the air.
We buttered their backs
Now we have light!
Now we have power!

This is, of course, basically a joke (remember the absurdum!), but the whole idea never sat right with me. If the cat wants to land on its feet and it’s falling feet first, why on Earth would it suddenly stop and start spinning? Sadly, my education left me without a good means of figuring this out. The closest I got to science in college was a survey-level Biology class, with nary a Physics class in sight. If you need someone to explain the histiocity of Holocaust denial or expound on legal philosophy, I’m your man. How things move in the universe, not so much.

I did some poking around and someone confirmed that I was right to think this doesn’t make any sense! The long and short of it involves the much larger mass of the cat as compared to the buttered/jammed toast:

So there it is – a completely hypothetical, terminally absurd thought experiment is debunked. I do take some satisfaction in this, even as I try to always keep in mind the MST3K motto to “repeat to yourself it’s just a[n album], you should really just relax.”

Let’s do just that, then, shall we?

Now We Have Light by Sanguine Hum

Now We Have Power by Sanguine Hum