I’m Home Sick With The Flu And I Just Received This Email From My Father

Ive come up with the phrase "blorbo-in-law" which is a fictional character who isn't, like, YOUR blorbo from YOUR shows but it is your mutual's blorbo who you nevertheless have developed strong opinions about due to long term dash exposure

Save me, John Flanagan (author of Ranger's Apprentice and Brotherband Chronicles) interviews.

Some good examples

When being asked why he wrote a prequel of storts for Rangers Apprentice. His response was...

"‘Cause I wanted to"

What were the challenges working on such large story arcs? The highlights?

I’m not aware of challenges.....

Do you have a favorite character from the series?

.... [rambling about how can you choose] ... However, if you push me, I really like Tug.... [Tug is the horse.]

Looking back, how has your writing evolved from when you first started until now?

Well, it’s got better, thank God. 

Here are some extra good repsonses:

"I make Halt’s stew; that’s where it came from."

and to paraphrase a response on why he wrote the Brotherband Chronicles where a main part of the plot is sailing.

I've always liked the sea.

Obsessed with this. Jumpings

I am going to eat this entire candy cane.

“It’s so exciting." "What?" "Things which you have no control over. You can see this great big storm coming towards you, and you can’t do anything about it! You have to time it just right.” “When to make a run for shelter, you mean?” “I knew you’d understand.”

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.

Ok actually genuine tip for new tumblr users: if you see a post you like and want to reblog but theres a bad/annoying added on bit in the reblog chain feel free to just reblog that post straight from op or the last person who knew how to mind their business