Paradise Sloth @mossberrybrew - Tumblr Blog

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dreamingamongthestars

Happy Ides of March here's a reminder that the ruins of the building where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary

rocktheholygrail

me and the bestie celebrating the ides of march

jame7t

just because youre made of stardust & other gay shit doesnt mean that a bug isnt. be nice to a bug today

rudjedet

downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

wine-dark-sea

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

teaboot

I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

ophilosoraptoro

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

rudjedet

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

interstellar-lamb-deactivated20

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

orangejulii

Don't leave this in the tags

moral-autism

You can get lost in a city! Have your protagonists get “lost in the desert near the pyramids” and then cut to them at Pizza Hut arguing about where to find their hotel.

ayeforscotland

As we see a barrage of evil executive orders come in, they are not immediately enforceable and will takes months or years to implement.

That’s still not great, but don’t let these pile up to the point of hopelessness. Take a breath, and look community leaders who will fight it every step of the way.

everentropy

Reminder that when Trump was in office before a LOT of his orders got overturned or held up in lower courts for long enough that they became irrelevant. It also does not mean they WILL be enforced. Stand with your community where you can. The fight is not over. Do not obey in advance.

ayeforscotland

Last sentence above is the most important. Tyranny requires people to shut up and fall in line. Do not obey in advance.

teashoesandhair

The thing about Elon Musk is that he's just such a fucking loser. Look at him. He has the flesh of a thousand maggots stuffed into a corpse. His complexion is like 13lbs of cottage cheese shoved into a bin liner. Nothing he says makes any fucking sense in this universe, the next, the one after that, nor the next successive infinities. He moves with all the grace and elegance of a Cybertruck being catapulted into a wall. He looks like he smells of morning breath and mouldy bread. Visually, he's almost indistinguishable from boiled tripe, and mentally, there's no almost. Ignorance is bliss, and he's on cloud nine. He has all the money in the world, and he can't buy himself a single atom of street cred. He looks like he's always ten seconds from giving himself a titty twister. He looks like the nebulous form of a half-remembered ghoul. He's fallen over the precipice of the uncanny and smacked every branch of the unfathomable on the way down. Every single thing he does, every word he says, every gesture he makes, is an attempt to overcompensate for the fact that he looks like he should be a 12 year old boy in a cartoon called Timmy The Supremely Bullyable. He is a truly pitiable specimen. His vibes aren't rancid so much as they're non-existent. He's a black hole of charisma. A void of talent and gravitas. And he knows it. He knows all of it. But he can't do a damn thing about it, and so we all have to fucking deal with it. Boils my piss.

teashoesandhair

He looks like what you'd get if you showed an alien a child's drawing of a man for five seconds, then asked the alien to recreate it in papier mâché. He's the exact representation of giving someone a turd for Christmas, and wrapping it in four slices of room temperature ham. If you put him in the middle of any schoolyard in the known world, he wouldn't survive it; he'd be ripped to pieces by a group of 10 year old girls in seconds. When he attempts to smile, it looks exactly like he's chanced a fart and lost the bet. He's the only human being on Earth who appears to have cells visible to the naked eye. He looks like he's been hastily superimposed onto oatmeal. It looks like he has sweaty toes and crumbs of week-old toilet paper in the crack of his festering arse, from which most of his ideas have their genesis. He's so slimy that if he were to fall over at any point, he'd slide for 200 metres without stopping. He looks like his own left hand stopped calling him back three decades ago. On days he's too busy huffing his own farts to go into the office, he just sets out a bowl of curdled yoghurt and sends it in his stead, because no-one can tell the fucking difference. 'Loser' isn't a strong enough word. He's a skidmark on the unwashed pants of humanity, a piss stain on our collective bathroom floor that's too engrained in the grouting to mop up without just ripping up all the tiles and starting over.

a-book-of-creatures

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.

seldo

I'd call this net zero information except I learned quite a lot. Except what an electric eel was called before electricity was discovered.

a-book-of-creatures

I already posted this in previous reblogs, but here it is again! In Tupi the electric eel is called puraké, poraké, poroquê, poraquê, puraquê, or simply purá. Puraké also means deception or disguise. In Yanomami the electric eel is õrãmisiwë, shenini, or yahetipa. Sometimes the metaphor wakë rë yëre ha is used to refer to it (“the place where fire burns”). And there are others, certainly.

References

Lizot, J. (2004). Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua yãnomãmi. Vicariato Apostólico de Puerto Ayacucho.

Navarro, E. (2007). Dicionário Tupi Antigo A Língua Indígena Clássica Do Brasil. Global Editora.

2well2water

i fucking hate it when a movie or a tv show does some shit where a character has a shitty dad and another character tells them to forgive him because. "it's your dad". that means nothing. more people should be killing their fathers.

2well2water

no everyone should be killing their fathers no matter what

reconstructionbaby

hello i’m hoziest and this is my song i’m already in church

headspace-hotel

This post implies the existence of Hozey, who is not at church and has no desire to go.

thoodleoo

deadendstyle

aquietwhyme

And it's sickening because so much of the development of HIV medicine has been publicly funded. We fucking paid for this research dozens of times over; without that public funding there would be almost nothing new for pharmaceutical companies to ransom I mean sell in the first place.

despazito

Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form

roach-works

my opinion as an american is that we spend way too much time trying to save african megafauna and nowhere near enough time making fun of the english for turning an entire island--which was once a hazelnut food forest--into a goddamn lawn.

bill bryson once actually wrote down in a whole book and got published that the english were superb gardeners and i about threw the book out the window i was that outraged. the english!!! the fucking ENGLISH. them? that's who you want to laud? the english

the

THERE ARE A GRAND FUCKING TOTAL OF ZERO STAPLE CROPS ORIGINALLY OR EVEN PRIMARILY CULTIVATED BY THE ENGLISH. NONE OF THEM. NOT POTATOES NOT WHEAT NOT TURNIPS NOT RYE. THEY GNAWED THEIR ISLAND DOWN TO A NUB FOR NOTHING. THE WOLVES AND BEARS ALL GONE FOR NOTHING. THE WILDCATS AND BIRDS AND MUSTELIDS AND INSECTS, GONE IN THEIR THOUSANDS, FOR NOTHING. FOR SOME SHEEP. FOR

THEIR MAIN AGRICULTURAL EXPORT IS FAMINE

anyway the english approach to agriculture, biodiversity, and environmentalism is roughly on par with a dog's approach to someone else's homework and everywhere in the world that has inherited their cack-fisted disdain for nature has suffered immensely. i can't overstate enough how bad things have been and still are.

please make fun of them. it's the least they fucking deserve.