retroneko

[retroneko]

[retroneko]

Eyes of the forest. Aspen trees

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letterpress postcards by Pottering Cat, Japan

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suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

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I am anti-Fascism.

I live in the country that allowed a fascist to rise to power and kill millions. After this Germany made sure to teach every child what fascism looks like (and what dead bodies of Jews, political opponents and gay people piled up in concentration camps) look like, so this never happens again.

Hitler rose to power because he was able to inspire the masses. And people fell for his lies and hate speech. Additionally, people didn't bother or dare to stand up to his shit - or because their friends/families where fascists and they didn't want to step on their toes.

If I stumble into a blog that supports fascism (by spreading pro-MAGA, pro-Trump, pro-racism, anti-LGBTQ+, or anti-democracy stuff) I will block that blog.

I don't want my art to be reblogged in between their pro-fascism shit.

[retroneko]

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Popuri from Harvest Moon but as a PNGtuber model!

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this is my drawing of xena beating the fuck out of elon musk

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🎀 Stunning illustrations from Lady Lovely Locks and the Pixietails: For the Love of Lady Lovelylocks; written by Teddy Slater and illustrated by Pat Paris; published in 1987 🎀

Read the full book here!

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what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

[retroneko]

[retroneko]

Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.