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the kindest bug in the world just curled up to sleep

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immersive pikachu (animated ver)

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*gordon ramsey at a kink party voice* cockwarming? you call this warm? it's bloody burnt that thing is. you've cremated it, it's naught but fucking ashes! *turns around and sees a pup* for fucks sake there's animals in the kitchen too. he's got fucking paws and he could cook a cock better than you

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Really interesting thing I glimpsed on rednote today

I think We- we’re developing international class consciousness 

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me: i sure hope our submarine has the weapons necessary to sink that enemy ship

the reliable and explosive torpedoes:

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"I think on some level, she knows what's been done in her name."

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Be gay, trans and alive

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Day of dread, Tye Martinez

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i think what people tend to forget is that laughing at modern art also counts as having a dialogue with it. like as long as you're respectful of the museum space and whatnot. you are under no obligation to take any of it seriously. when i go to a modern art museum I do engage with every piece and read the blurb and think deeply/discuss its intention and its execution but it doesnt stop me from having a giggle at the ones i think are stupid. often the artist is equally aware that it may be stupid. sometimes that's the point also. it's fun!

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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.

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勝田恭平／Katsuta Kyohei

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