Shaq O'neal's aquarium

He has two of them installed by the Acrylic Tank Manufacturing featured on Animal Planet's television show Tanked. His new one is Egyptian. It takes up the whole room. The team was assigned the project of designing the entire room. The team got their idea from a Las Vegas lounge.

Goodie gumdrops. What's not to like?

The eyes go directly to the hieroglyphics and the instant they come into focus I'm disappointed. Dadgum these gumdrops. 

The beetle is seen first and three marks under it, a half circle (basket) at bottom and sun disc Re on top Kepher-y neb Re, the becoming, the images lord Re. It just looks like "the  images of Lord Re" and that's Tut. Come on. We talked about this before. All of us recognize this. Does it have to be so common? 

Skip the squarish thing, it's nonsense. It's a 3 and the symbol O33, a palace facade, itself sometimes used as cartouche in oldest style hieroglyphics, this time inside a square cartouche. 

The proper rounded cartouche on the left is instantly recognizable as Tut, the most common cartouche in all history by that quail that sticks out. The hieroglyph quail chick with the two semi circles placed in the negative space of the ligature creating a sort of percent sign says, Tut, or more often twat. Maybe twet. It's more often a w than it is a u but we'll give them Tut for tradition.

Because nobody wants to go around saying Twatankhamun.

And they never say what the rest of that means. The top is very common ligature in royal names, "Amun" more exactly Eh men (redundant) n, again, the frond is "eh" the game board is "men" and the zigzag water is redundant "n" and we see why these pictures went out of style. Those zigzags are hard to draw and even more difficult to carve in stone, one wrong move and the whole row is messed up, and all for a redundant sound to fill negative space in a ligature satisfyingly artistically. It's ridiculous. 

Anyway, from the top to the middle, it says, Amun ankh Tut. They switched it around to give the god written priority out of respect. It's confusing because sometimes they don't. So far, Amun, Tut, life. 

They say it means "the living image of Amun" 

But "tut" means courageous or strong, not image, kepher means that. We already know that from the beetle. This whole time all over the place they're telling us the wrong thing when you break it down to its bits. 

The bottom row are shepherd's hook and symbols for places and most translations never even bother with these. The hook refers to dominion of royalty the thing that looks like a butter churn is actually an architectural column with a peg on the top of the sort to fit into a cross beam or into an empolia, a centering hole in another column. The symbol is translated "Iunu", their name for a place at the far southern border, Heliopolis in Greek, also "On." The plant is translated  "sw" or "swt" and refers to the northern Egypt, the delta area, rather like saying, "rules from New York to Los Angeles" and they always leave that part off in translations. 

Disappointingly common. After all the resources Shaq makes available and nice as it is, this is the best they can do. Surely they know there will be people coming through who recognize all this on sight and know it for the tritest of all possible trites. I could dip into my laptop's trash bin and pull out the addresses of a dozen avid student Egyptologists who would all eagerly fill all the available space on those walls and throughout that aquarium with authentic hieroglyphics that say whatever you want them to say. They'd cheerfully take up the project for free as homework and discuss their production between them with no goofy nonsense or anything trite. What a bummer, with all that money and end up with basically a gift shop. Set designers do better. 

It's a very cool room if you don't care anything about Egyptian script. 

The wall paper looks similar to the tomb of Ti who followed Tut. The carving style is similar and blue background is similar but there are significant differences too. Ti's tomb is mostly pleasant scenes of daily life and less scenes formal religious scenes of Going Forth by Day. I've used pictures of his tomb many times. Ti has boat scenes as do other tombs with bas reliefs with blue background but they're all different from these. There are cartouche hieroglyphs showing but they're too tiny to read. Google images: [Dendera Temple, near Qena] looks similar.

The wallpaper beats the rest of carvings on the aquarium. They could have done much better with all that. Had they only asked we could have helped Shaq have a better more convincing Egyptian lounge room. But NooOOoooo. 

Tanked

Tanked is a television show on Animal Planet channel about a family owned business in Las Vegas that constructs specialized aquariums. The family speaks to each other in brutal New Jersey accent but their affection for each other shines through.

(I had the show on tonight in the background while preparing a batch of Anasazi beans and red Swiss chard but this is irrelevant to the subject at hand.)

One of their accounts was for a dining room table that displays all the fish from the top. A technical problem is the table must be filled completely with no air gaps or else condensation would fog the view from the top, and there needs to be surface agitation to create air exchange, so they designed a centerpiece shaped like a square vase that does all that with an insert that holds another vase for an impressive floral display. And all of the pipes must be concealed.

They did a beautiful job.

At wrap up one of the sons said to his father in unvarnished rough imperative, a tone I would never use with my dad, "Now you gotta use your etiquette experience and set the table by yourself." Then he leaves. The father addresses the camera directly, smiling broadly and in his own gruff accent."

"Now is my time to shine."

The clients were thrilled with the result. "Now everyone can see our products."

Notice the practical problem?