Lazy McBeth

Everything’s in order in a black hole

[soul-hammered]

Nice

[formlessdemi]

Nice

[chuck-e-cheese-anime-faces]

Nice

[iamoutofideas]

Nice

[steakplissken]

Nice

[date-an-anarchist-suggestions]

Nice

[winterinthetardis]

*shows up 15 months late with starbucks* anyway here’s my vine compilation

[sparkle-fart-69]

Fuck, Millennials are fucking hilarious

[tamalehousenumber4-deactivated2]

I always feel better about youths after a good vine comp.

[tha--snazzle]

t-t-t-t-t-target!!!!!

[sinfullyselected-deactivated201]

“Do you speak any Japanese?”

“I’m Chinese I don’t speak any-”

“‘Cause if you do, I’ll sleep with you right now.”

“MITSUBISHI, TOYOTA”

[baldheadedlilboy]

“Bitch cone get me, not only is he ugly but his dishes talk!” “Who you talking to Belle?” “Uh… No one…. bitch that was his plate!”

[stuckinapril]

i am a simple girl i seek academic validation and get absolutely destroyed when i don’t receive it

[tikkety-tok]

"Love taking an 8 minute route that takes an abled 2 minutes"

[tonka-bean]

Able-bodied people, this is what your world is like. In a new situation it's also usually impossible to even know an alternate route, so the options are like enduring the painful and dangerous illegal barriers or...going home. And for the people suggesting the op report these things- that's a great suggestion but you should also be aware of how often businesses, governments, schools flat out ignore concerns like this.

If it troubles you, I highly suggest making your own complaints every time you see something like this.

Do not shop at businesses that break the law. Do not let governments who deny disabled rights go unchallenged. Don't do nothing when your world is dangerous to us.

[autarque]

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

— Charles Baudelaire, La fanfario

[kingpin-of-steel-act3]

[ihatenearlyeverything]

its ok theyre Gods lil helpers

[oatmealbrain]

And boy are they clumsy

[hydrangeafae]

Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human

[polar-solstice]

IM SO PLEASED TO LEARN THIS!!!

They are just!!! Student drivers!!! 😭

[chysgoda]

@wearepaladin some bees for you.

[tiktoks-repost]

[elecktrum]

The only possible response

[simplystormie]

Everyone just GETS it

[geek11562]

I made a meme JUST for this post bc it was so wholesome

[somecutething]

I am smol.

(via KiwiBugThePug)

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

How to Care Less about what Other People Think

1. Know what matters to you, personally – what you stand for, and what your values are .

2. Don’t be anxious about breaking social norms. The more often you do this, and go against the flow, the less it will bother you to simply be yourself.

3. Decide not to live as a people pleaser, or to get upset and take rejection personally.

4. Hang out with people who are self confident, who know what they believe in, and what they want from life. You’ll find their self-confidence will rub off on you, too, and you’ll start to worry less about what other people think.

5. Working on becoming more competent in the skills and areas that matter to you. That will naturally enhance your self confidence, and develop a self image that is strong and positive.

6. Travel, or spend time with lots of different people. That will show you how diverse attitudes and outlooks are. That is, there’s no one way of being – so find, and be, yourself.

[mioxenoblade]

[catasters]

[lunawolf237-is-gay]

[hannahhillam]

I threw a dog on the ground today 😭😭😭

[coffeeandstring]

I am embarrassed by how hard this made me laugh.

[fatsexybitch]

…..does this mean cat people hurl cats at the ground?

[hollowedskin]

you just kind of… open ur arms and they sort themselves out. if you try and place them down they get mad and wiggle and make everything worse

[everydayconman]

[shotfromguns]

some friends of mine have the most un-cat-ish cat i have ever met

my quintessential example of this:

i was holding him in my arms petting him while we were picking out what games to play that night. when we’d decided on a few, i needed to put the cat down in order to, you know, carry boxes. so i started letting him down, expecting that he’d eventually do the cat hop thing… but he never did.

i ended up lowering him all the way to the floor. and even then he never got his feet under him. i just sort of… plopped him down on his side as he stared up at me like a betrayed sack of flour.

[thecheshirecass-deactivated2018]

I saw this so clearly in my mind and I’m never going to stop laughing at betrayed sack of flour.

[daftzilla]

Miette’s long lost brother, the betrayed sack of flour

[roboco-san]

the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth

[bananonbinary]

cant believe i lost $1000 when i told some guy at walmart to give it to me and he said no

[lesbianshepard]

[asdfgbhjkfrgfkslehelsfhelfew-de]

twilight but instead of a dramatic reveal about how edward’s a vampire bella just shows up to class one day and slides a copy of Dracula across the table to see what happens 

[solitairians]

happy first Bella From Twilight Depression Month

[systlin]

Egypt, 3,000 BCE; “Hey if you let electric eels shock you it helps with pain.”

The Modern Era, 5,000 years later; “Hey wait, we can use electricity to interrupt nerve signals and relieve pain.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors, giving each other a high five of vindication; “Took ‘em long enough.”

[arandomblackbook]

Also The Modern Era, 5000 years later; “We don’t need science to ease pain. I got homeopathy and essential oils.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors; “Oh my Gods, Karen, do some research.”

[evolution-incarnate]

Electric eels don’t live in Egypt though

They live in South America

[systlin]

My bad, electric catfish, got ‘em mixed up.

[evolution-incarnate]

it is a much funnier mental image for it to be this funky chunky fish

[systlin]

Egyptian doctors, 3,000 BCE, pointing to a pool with one of these bois in it. “Yeah go stand in there and your arthritis’ll feel better.”

Ancient Egyptian with bad knees; “You’re shitting me, right.”

Ancient Egyptian doctors; “Did we fucking stutter.”

[rudjedet]

[This is a long story, for the TL;DR scroll all the way down.]

So I’d never heard of this before, and I decided to see if I could find anything concrete about this. After some digging I found two papers from a seemingly legitimate source on this subject. These come from the Academia profile of one Rosalind Park M.A., B.Sc., who has authored a good deal of papers on astronomy in Greco-Roman Egypt. The one that’s most pertinent to this alleged use of live electric catfish in Egyptian medicine as pain treatment is “Ancient Egyptian Headaches: Ichthyo- or Electrotherapy?”

In her abstract she starts by saying that she’s going to speculate whether or not certain treatments in Egyptian medical papyri are to be taken as early forms of electrotherapy. She does this by comparing these treatments to later treatments in Greco-Roman times, looking at existing translations and suggesting possible new translations. 

The treatment she gives in this paper is Ebers 250:

My translation of this treatment is as follows:

Another [remedy] for illnesses in the side of the head: head of catfish fried in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.

The most important words for this discussion are nar, catfish, snwx, to boil/to burn/to fry, and Hr mrHt, in oil.

Ebers 250 is a remedy for disease(s) in the side of the head, which Park takes to be migraine. That’s a reasonable assumption, considering “side of the head” is specificied here. However, she finds it highly improbable that the Egyptian physician would sit down and fry up an entire head of catfish as a treatment. Instead, she suggests that the translation should be read differently. 

Her argument is that snwx should not be read as a verb, “fried”, but rather as an adjective, “frying”. Though she does say that we can only make guesses as to how the Egyptians viewed the concept of nature’s electricity, she then states that snwx might be “the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.” (2007: 4) Her reasoning behind seems to in part hinge on the Arabic word ra’ad, which fishermen nowadays use to describe this fish, and which means “thunderstorm” or “lightning”, and that a different electrically charged fish native to Egypt is allegedly used as a hieroglyph in the word for “thunderstorm”, hAhAty, which I am unable to locate.

Park then goes on to suggest the following amended translation and rewording:

Head of the frying-Narfish (or the fish which causes ‘to fry’) applied to the migraine sufferer’s head (once every) 4 days.

In her view, the catfish needs to be alive and was to be applied to the head of the sick person in a form of proto-electrotherapy. 

Straight off the bat there are two major problems with her translation and subsequent conclusion. The rewording is not the biggest issue - in general, it’s not frowned upon to take liberties with a translation in order to attain a more legible result, though I personally think in medical translations it’s for the best to stay as close to the source material as possible. However, in her reworded translation Park completely emits the words “in oil”, which make up half of the treatment, thus changing the entire contents of the remedy.

That’s a massive red flag. If I put “in oil” back in, while taking her interpretation of snwx as an adjective into account, I get this:

Another for illnesses in the side of the head: head of frying-catfish in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.

That’s a lot more ambiguous still than her “reworded” translation with half the remedy missing. 

The other glaring problem with this is the phrase “[snwx is] the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.”

“Frying” to refer to the concept of electricity or electrophysiology is an English idiom, and there is absolutely no evidence the Egyptian language made use of a similar idiom. Park’s additional suggestion that we need to consider the words Arab fishermen use to describe this fish is extremely tenuous. I could accept the words “numbing” or “stinging” as a possible technical fit, but I need a hell of a lot more evidence to accept “frying”.  

I reject Park’s conclusion that the verb snwx in Ebers 250 should be read as an adjective, and therefore points to the possible existence of a type of proto-electrotherapy. She claims her rewording is a “more lucid” interpretation of this remedy, citing that it seems improbable a physician would fry up a fish head to cure migraines. Considering that the Ebers Papyrus lists a remedy for trouble passing urine that requires cooking/frying a document in oil and rubbing the stomach with it for a number of days, it doesn’t sound all that improbable to me. I’m also very opposed to attempts at qualifying Egyptian remedies by terms such as “lucid”, because they bypass the Egyptian point of view and engage in modern bias.  

I’m currently unable to find any  remedies in the medical papyri that use live, electric catfish in an unambiguous manner that could be said to be a form of proto-electrotherapy. Greco-Roman sources do seem to be using live electric catfish, but Greco-Roman Egypt is a whole different ballgame from Egypt-5000-years-ago. There are recipies that involve catfish, but these specify a particular part of the catfish to be used. When a medical papyrus gives a part of an animal to use, they mean only that part. When they write “rub the balls of a black ass against the belly”, they certainly don’t mean “lift up the entire live donkey and hold him dick-first against the patient”. 

TL;DR: There is, to my knowledge, no evidence Pharaonic Egyptian physicians from 3000 BC onward used live electric catfish to treat afflictions such as migraine, gout or arthritis. There may be some evidence that Greco-Roman era physicians did use live electrically charged fish in their medicinal administrations, but this isn’t enough to indicate a one-on-one “they did it too” connection. And if you are going to suggest a new translation that fundamentally changes the content of a text, please remember to use all the important words. 

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Just because I’m a nerd, and I’ve discussed this with @rudjedet after I couldn’t give up on whatever the hell hAhAty was, I did some digging on my own.

First off, the reason Sonja and then myself had such a hard time tracking down hAhAty was because Park had not used the correct transliteration: using the h (normal h) instead of X (h with a line under it). Therefore, hAhAty should read XAXAty and has the translation of ‘tempest’, which is congruent with Park’s assertions.

However, when it comes to Park’s assertions that the ra’ad fish is yet another ‘electric fish’ in the Nile that could perform this task I have some serious reservations. 

For a start let’s name the fish that Gardiner transliterates as XAt, and calls Oxyrhynchus. For Egyptians this was the Medjed fish; the fish that was supposed to have eaten the penis of Osiris when Seth cut him up and chucked his body in various parts of the country. It’s associated with ‘bad things’ metaphorically like ‘corpse’ and ‘widow’ as it’s the fish related to the Osirion myth. The Egyptians liked their cultural throwbacks in word design! In modern terms, we know this fish as Mormyridae, or ‘Elephant fish’, because it has a little ‘trunk’. This fish does have a very weak electric current which it uses to sense its surroundings in turbulent waters (Nile cataracts). From what I can tell it’s not strong enough to do anything to a human, let alone cure a headache if applied directly to the head. 

So she can argue the toss about it being ‘electricity’ but the elephant fish is used in so many other words that have nothing to do with ‘lightning’ that the metaphor would need modern knowledge of how thunderstorms work to actually fulfil its purpose. The only reason that fish is used in the word for ‘thunderstorm’ is that the elephant fish and thunderstorms are associated with Seth (he fed a penis to that fish, and he also was said to cause storms), and therefore it’s a cultural metaphor to link ‘storms’ with Seth and not a case of ‘this fish has an electric current’. The entire premise of the paper is on very shaky ground as it is, and it’s only taken Sonja and I some brief research to prove it entirely unfounded and full of modern bias that distorts the Egyptian record to show something that it does not. 

[rudjedet]

Hi we’re Egyptologists on Tumblr and when we read a bad paper we sink our teeth into it. 

[rudjedet]

Going back to the actual contents of Ebers 250 real quick, and how Park thinks the original translation is nonsensical because who on earth applies a fried catfish to the head in order to cure a migraine - I just realised that we probably should not look at the catfish as the main ingredient, but at the oil.

I also mentioned the Ebers remedy for a person who has trouble passing urine, which is cooking/warming a document in oil and rubbing it into the belly. Now, in both cases (and many, many more Egyptian remedies), the original phrasing is ambiguous for us modern people. But considering the nature of Egyptian medicine, which was empirical, with a good portion of its treatments being manually therapeutical, I’d propose a slightly different reading of either treatment.

To wit, it’s not the catfish head that should be applied to the head, or the document to the belly, but the oil in which either has been cooked.

Then it makes perfect sense even to us, and Park needn’t worry about it not being “lucid” enough to cook a catfish to cure migraines. The catfish (or the document) is the ingredient that passes its effectiveness onto the oil (the ingredients chosen for recipes like this are almost always metaphorical or religious), but it is the oil itself with which the ailment is treated. The original word used for “apply” is “gs”, which can also be translated as “annoint” or “smear”. Manual massage with oil imbibed with an ingredient that has a specific religious connotation is a fair interpretation of the original remedy, and one that could have had an effect. Perhaps not in the case of migraines, but tension headaches, or upset guts, might have found relief from a massage with (warm) oil, regardless of what had been cooked in that oil beforehand.

This is also supported by many other recipes in which parts of the body are massaged by ointments and unguents in order to effectuate a cure. I think that’s a far more reasonable explanation than electrotherapy-by-fish.

And this is also why it’s so important to not leave entire ingredients out of a translation.

[hereticallyeverafter]

I agree, but I have a question: is it possible the specific fish required for the treatment was selected BECAUSE of it’s electric “properties” and they were going for an electrotherapy-via-osmosis thing, or just because it was a culturally significant animal?

[rudjedet]

It’s not an electrotherapy-by-osmosis thing, it was very probably selected because the catfish was connected to regeneration, and we can assume its head was used because it is a remedy for a head illness.

I’ve covered it in some more detail here:

So I’m still thinking about the catfish and I probably won’t be able to let this go for another few weeks because that’s just the way my bra