Some Witches Skating

can someone recommend some beginner normal behaviors for someone looking to become normal

Today's Seal Is: Mmmm....Ducky...Ducky...Ducky...

Some Cool Facts I learned from Queer, There, and Everywhere: 27 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager:

Bisexuality and polyamory were the norm in Han Dynasty China, with many empowers having a female wife and an official male companion. It only ended because Emperor Ai of Han had wanted his male partner, Dong Xian, to succeed the throne.

Queer people had their in own country in Oceania from 2004-2017: The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands

Abe Lincoln had a male “intimate friend” called Joshua Fry Speed

Albert Cashier was a trans Irish immigrant who fought for the Union. His fellow soldiers from the Ninety-Fifth made sure he was buried as a man

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were lovers, their correspondances shared after their deaths.

Vroom vroom

Frozen beach with glowing coconuts. Yum! ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝🌴❄️

The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands was founded in 2004 by a group of queer Australians. Its flag was the rainbow flag, its currency the Pink Dollar, and its national anthem Gloria Gaynor’s I am what I am.

Check out our podcast to learn more about the kingdom!

[Images: The Kingdom’s emperor Dale Parker Anderson stands beside a rainbow flag; a plaque reading: “The Gay Kingdom: On the 14th day of June 2004 at this, the highest point in the Coral Sea, Emperor Dale Parker Anderson raised the gay rainbow flag and claimed the Islands of the Coral Sea in his name as a homeland for the gay and lesbian people of the world. God Save our King!”; A sign on a beach which reads “Welcome to Heaven, Cato Island Post Code 0000, Capital of the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom, www.gayandlesbiankingdom.com” draped with a rainbow flag, next to a post box labelled “Royal Gay Mail”]

Thank you @blewitbalatron for the wonderful idea of replacing each dart Sun had to endure with a kiss ‼️‼️took a while on this because

Anyway!! What?! Moon didn’t get direct kisses, only dealt with the aftermath :( he might ask for some more tho hehe

I think springtrap needs to be gently and lovingly booped on the nose :3

you have been spared

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.