Theinfinityarchivist - The ♾️ Archivist

I love how ominous and cryptically poetic the ravens part sounds

I was really hesitant when my mom said she wanted to go to this wolf dog sanctuary several hours south of us. I didn’t want to be a tourist for a shady off brand zoo. But I looked the place up before agreeing. They’re completely aboveboard, all animals are spayed/neutered when entering the haven and they’re all given the space and respect they deserve.

The sanctuary serves as education and warning. Don’t get wolf dogs is practically emblazoned on every sign.

All the animals were high content, 95% wolf were most common. Their lowest was about 75% and his silly curled tail marked him as doggier than any of the others, yet he still had a sad story of being dumped in a shipping crate for days because he was too much for a house pet. Probably because he’s largely a wolf.

At the end the owner invited their two friendly ambassador animals to see if they’d like to say hello. They both did. I was politely sniffed and had my chin gently licked by the older male. The younger female demanded aggressive belly rubs and then set about biting the owner in a rough game that only she enjoyed.

Overhead ravens swooped in the treetops and made eerie eldritch calls to each other, like an echoing plink of water at the bottom of a well. It was honestly such a day.

Lumi, my favorite wolf of the day as tax he was huge and gangly and paced the fence staring at me, perhaps remembering the eighteen year old girl who had kept him in an apartment to be bred before he came to the sanctuary.

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.

Source details and larger version.

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

Poppy blooming. Nuria Martinez Marquez.

He didn't have his adenoids removed. Healthful Living, Based on the Essentials of Physiology. 1934.

Internet Archive

Found in a textbook uploaded by AaronC

Since the name I was going to use for my solo music career, Will Wood, is already taken by some nobody with a ukulele, I’ve decided I will start releasing music under the pseudonym Paul Penis. Keep your ears open everyone, check your Spotifys for Paul Penis, big things are coming from future hit indie musician Paul Penis.

I'm finally installing Linux on my PC

I'm so fucking sick of windows and Microsoft. The fucking nerve to show me ads on my lock screen and my start menu. I'm sick of it and I want open source shit now