Isaac Newton’s grand work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, is sometimes listed as having been over 900 pages long in the original three volumes. More recent editions come in at 466 or so and, of course, the original was printed in Latin. Then the language of the learned.
After some centuries and minor modifications via Albert Einstein and others you’d think the matter (specifically the inverse square law) had been settled. After all, we put men on the moon using that equation and that, as they say, should have been that.
But in 1799, an obscure scholar named Hans Becker gave the book a good going over and discovered, or so he claimed, three critical errors that devastated the whole hypothesis and revealed a much clearer picture of the natural world and the forces within it. He wrote a rebuttal to Newton’s work that totaled some 1234 page but didn’t publish it as he was killed a short time later in the Battle of Abukir while fighting for the French in Napolean’s ill fated adventure in Egypt.
He was a busy little man and one wonders where he found the time.
In any event, the book contained one major flaw. It was written entirely in a code of Becker’s own creation and thus his work was lost to the ages. No key to the code was ever found and scholars have, for two centuries now, tried and failed to decode it.
Then, in 2023, a Czech scientist working at Charles University in Prague, doing extensive research in Mathematics, took a stab at it. He decided to try out a newly developed AI created specifically for such research and went to work.
He freely admitted it was just an exercise. No one expected a grand break through in physics or any other such discipline. It was simply a code breaking attempt as all previous attempts at cracking Becker’s code had been spectacular failures and this was a chance to test the limits of an AI wrestling with just such a problem. He was elated to find, almost instantly, a complete translation of Becker’s master work.
That is, he did until he read the first sentence which went as follows:
“Great buttons! The camel’s gone foamy!”
What followed was over a thousand pages of more or less the same. What did it mean? Was it a code within a code? A cipher to obscure the code? A practical joke by a German who enlisted in the French army and died in the shadow of the pyramids? Or was he just looney as the Canadian dollar and worth much less?
Recently, Butler 1 and Butler 2, that is to say, Sherlock’s Butlers, sat down to have a standard Butler songwriting session and produce more material for our new album. It, of course, turned into a bullshit session as such things often do and the above tale was related by Butler 2 to his partner Butler 1. The next thing you know, theories were flying and various tangents related before an idea formed into a strategy and boom, Butlers gone batshit.
Hey it happens.
The notion took hold that a code should be created and each new song encoded with it and sung as encoded. The result, hopefully, would be I Am The Walrus meets Jabberwooky meets Finnegan’s Wake after a bottle of single malt whisky and while having a poetry competition.
Or something like that. It made sense at the time.
In the full ripening of the morning sun, Butler 1 made a painful, tortured trip to the kitchen and brewed a pot of French Roast while cursing the world and then called Butler 2. Butler 2, apparently, had experienced a much more labored trip to the kitchen and was in no mood for ‘top of the mornings’ or any similar salutation. None the less, it was agreed that the previous day’s plan was a bunch of crap from beginning to end and neither had any idea what the hell they were thinking. This led to prolonged rumination during which, much to his consternation, Butler 1 discovered his coffee had simply refused to kick in and, indeed, had gone cold.
Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.
In lieu of that unfortunate fact, it was decided to continue the conversation at another time. That time was left unspecified but as we now know, so was the key to Hans Becker’s code. One man’s mystery is another man’s foamy camel.
So as you can see, creating the hits of tomorrow today while getting through yesterday and living to regret it is no easy task and not one to be taken on by just anybody. The pitfalls are many and the survivors are few. The meek are generally left on the side of the road to be devoured by wild dogs. Or bears. We’ve seen it happen.
So we ask for your patience as we plow our way through another winter of creative madness and odd sorties into places best left alone. We want to offer another album as soon as possible but the possible is sometime sidetracked by the absurd. We admit (for I am Butler 1, if we’re being honest here) that more often than not we’re just amusing ourselves. But honestly, any other approach would probably be counter productive as we are grumpy old men and, as we found out to our peril, it really is best not to poke the bear.
A recent email from one of our (couldn’t believe there were any) followers asked us if we were serious about the bear thing and if so where the hell was our studio located that bruins plodded through the property with such regularity. The answer of course is, none of your damn business. If you live in the state of Washington and don’t know where the Thunder Dog mountains are, then move to a state with a simpler geography! Some things are classified, as Butler 2 has made clear on numerous occasions, and here in bear country we are looking out for your safety as much as our privacy. So trust us, or not.
But we do hope you will enjoy our forthcoming album and are listening to our previous albums like madmen listening to voices.
We are Butlers after all and we live to serve.