TLDR it was a professor from Uzbekistan named Vladimir Reshetnikov who did it because he wanted people to be more interested in the niche problems people would post on there. Cleo wasn’t even his only account, he was doing multiple people
obsessed with the conversation around queerbaiting coming back because of 911 but pinknews still chooses to use a cover photo from a show that ended 5 years ago. her influence🩷
psychoanalyzing the gender/identity dichotomy between ice skating and ice hockey and coming to the more objectively correct conclusion that ice hockey is rooted in motherly feminine behavior of protecting the nest and that ice skating is about masculine peacocking of one’s own physical prowess in seeking a mate
They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.
The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he’s just curious to see how far this goes.
To keep us on out toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.
Improved symbols for the flongal plosives (“gacks”), flongal trill (“hacks”), flongal fricatives (“groans”), and and the flongal lateral approximant (“moans”)
Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should’ve done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise. The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.
update: the builders are all speaking different sign languages now
I actually think it’s so funny that the way a hormonal IUD works is that it just lies to your uterus and fools it into believing it’s pregnant. but instead of a fetus there’s just a little plastic doodad in there. I’m pregnant and it’s The Contraption.
my dumbass uterus: “man this thing has been cooking for like 5 years I bet it’s gonna be the most awesome baby of all time”
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.
I’d call this net zero information except I learned quite a lot. Except what an electric eel was called before electricity was discovered.
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.
hey so uh the consuls asked me to talk to you about your divination techniques and uh. no yeah i get that you’ve been a great asset and successfully predicted the favor of the gods over the proposal to construct a new aqueduct. that was great, you’re great. just uh. well we were wondering if maybe you could speed it up a little bit next time- yes i know the omens can’t be rushed. but you did take like 30 minutes to read the entrails? and uh. to be perfectly honest we were all a little creeped out by the way you kept saying things like “oh that’s a SLIPPERY one” and “come to papa little kidney.” no no we’re not asking you to switch over to augury, you’re a great haruspex, really. if you could just not dig around in the entrails with a look of unbridled glee on your face quite as much that would be great. thanks.
to me the absolutely funniest part of cunk on earth is the fact that every single scientist without fail says “not as far as i’m aware of” instead of “no” whenever she asks them the most insane question possible.
i dont know how much of that show is scripted but i think their reactions are genuine (?) and like. that’s what scientists are really like. it’s hilarious. all my uni professors do the same thing, they word every negative response as a “well sounds wrong to me but idk bro maybe i just haven’t read about it yet so. whatever”.
if there is one thing we hate it’s definitive answers.
"if there is one thing we hate it’s definitive answers" well i think it depends really
the people who follow me are so cute by default. I don’t know how but everyone who has followed so far has been downright gorgeous. and then I get really nervous because cute people are looking at my posts
every once in a while i remember i can draw anything i want and go nuts and bolts and bananas for a while . you should do this too . get weird with it too
I was recently in one of Chicago’s more historic neighborhoods and I happened to notice that one of the museum-homes had paving brick outside with the word “Purington” on it, so I gave it a search in an idle moment and found the strange and compelling world of brick fandom. Technically most of the sites are people who salvage and resell historic brick and paving stone, but there’s a certain whiff of hyperfixation within this particular commercial niche.
Imagine paying for ninety acres of land with bricks. Imagine accepting ninety acres of land’s worth of bricks. I mean it makes sense in the era, why bother with cash when bricks will do, but like. Damn.
Also:
ALT
There’s something insanely compelling about the idea of rocking up to a freight car to start unloading bricks for the day and they’re still faintly warm. I’m not sure if it’s compelling like fresh warm bread or compelling like some kind of weird eldritch horror.
clean your room or drink a glass of water please if you don’t do at least one of these things I’ll explode and die but then I’ll recover and then explode and die again and this cycle will repeat forever until you save me
I feel like people are missing the Very Important reference picture and that’s just criminal. Clearly if you look at the dog that inspired the piece, you would understand the inherent validity of the voters’ choice.
Thank you for that addition but I assure you we all already understood the the validity of the voters choice
I go into a fugue state when DND planning I swear to god. I opened my laptop and I was creating a propoganda homework task for me to fake complete and then fake mark. So I could give it to my players as worldbuilding. What
So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.
So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).
However
After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.
Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.
So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.
I love a couple of things about this story:
Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood
As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building
BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM
These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.
So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.
So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).
However
After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.
Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.
So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.
I love a couple of things about this story:
Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood
As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building
BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM
These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.
gendered individual bathrooms piss me off. what’s the fucking point. if someone’s in the men’s fuck you im using the women’s. the only person I could possibly make uncomfortable is myself
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
