Artist: @/fauxmantis On Twitter

it's honestly nuts to me that critical infrastructure literally everywhere went down because everyone is dependent on windows and instead of questioning whether we should be letting one single company handle literally the vast majority of global technological infrastructure, we're pointing and laughing at a subcontracted company for pushing a bad update and potentially ruining themselves

like yall linux has been here for decades. it's stable. the bank I used to work for is having zero outage on their critical systems because they had the foresight to migrate away from windows-only infrastructure years ago whereas some other institutions literally cannot process debit card transactions right now.

global windows dependence is a massive risk and this WILL happen again if something isn't done to address it. one company should not be able to brick our global infrastructure.

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.

Your annual reminder to not donate to Salvation Army!

Vroom vroom

A little something I made for my patrons last year c:

I’ll do my best to draw whatever is at the end of the line 👍

Daily fish fact #782

Longspined porcupinefish!

As a defense against predators, this fish can swallow water into its stretchy stomach to quickly grow in size, erecting the sharp spines on its skin that otherwise lie flat! The stomach of the longspined porcupinefish is extremely specialised for this purpose: it is full of folds, has additional muscles surrounding it that squeeze out the water once it's time to deflate, and lacks any digestive ability.