Oh, you know it’s the Interlull when the most interesting thing that’s happened is an apparent Twitter beef between Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Real Madrid’s Toni Kroos over the captain wearing a mask for some goal celebrations during his career.
I haven’t viewed any of the replies, but I can imagine it’s full of:
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
SLAY HIM KING
‘This you?’, as someone discovers Kroos once knew a person whose mother-in-law had a brother who wore a mask and is thus immediately a maskist and a raging hypocrite.
Maybe it’s some kind of weird, meta thing about where we are in the glitch-filled matrix that is 2020. The software was supposed to do something to encourage people to wear masks to prevent the spread of the virus, but bugged out and now we have two professional footballers having at it digitally. What a world.
Speaking of the virus, it’s been a difficult few months for lots of people. It feels like this year has gone on for absolutely ages, like we’re in our third decade of 2020 itself but at the same time – when I think back to March when all this began – it’s also flown by. So much has happened with so much nothing happening on a day to day basis that it’s become blended into this strange cocktail of something that I can’t really explain well.
After what has been a fairly introspective week on the blog, I don’t feel the need to go over too much of that stuff again. There’s a brand new Arsecast which does that for you, so go check that out. There’s plenty of discussion of where we are, what we’re doing, what we’re not doing, how to do the stuff we’re not doing and improve the stuff we are doing, and loads more.
This morning, I want to point you in the direction of this:
Hey! If you’re an Arsenal supporting (or otherwise) small/local business, artist, freelancer, creator, service provider etc, we want to try help raise your profile coming up to Christmas.
See here for more info: https://t.co/gZSwPgXizg#arsebiz pic.twitter.com/RdW79EkCG4
— arseblog (@arseblog) November 12, 2020
With everything that’s going on, it’s going to be a very strange Christmas for very many reasons. One of them might be that shops are closed, or opening hours are restricted. Many independent businesses have suffered during the lockdown and the subsequent months; people who work in creative fields – musicians, DJs, club promoters etc – have had seen their livelihoods basically gone; restaurants and bars have been closed; and there are countless other examples of industries and services which have been negatively impacted by Covid-19.
I thought it might be a nice idea to try and use the platform Arseblog has to give Arsenal supporting business owners a chance to reach Arsenal supporting customers/clients. Rather than doing your shopping online at the Big Evil Tax Dodging South American River place, see if there’s someone local who could use your custom. It doesn’t even have to be local, if you need hiking socks and Harry’s Hiking Sock Store on the other side of the world can give you what you need, why not give them the business? If you need a designer, a copywriter, a gardener, food delivered, a handyman or woman, to order some books from a local independent bookstore, or whatever it is, perhaps you can find it here.
As I am quite technologically terrible with things that aren’t about blogging or podcasting, I don’t really know the best way to make this as handy as I can. Andrew Allen talked about putting together a shared spreadsheet which includes everyone’s details, but if anyone has ideas about a better way to put the data out into the world in a handy, easy to use format, please feel free to get in touch.
For now, you can check out the replies to the initial Twitter post I made, as well as filtering using the hashtag #arsebiz. So, just to reiterate, if you have a business/service and you want to let people know about it, reply to the Tweet with this info:
Business name:
Location:
What you do/sell/make:
Website/contact info:
Also, please make sure you use the hashtag #arsebiz as a way to help collate these Tweets.
I guess the best chance this has of working well is the more it’s shared, so if you think this is useful – either as a business owner or a consumer – please feel free to give it a RT. The more people we can reach, the wider the array of options there will be for folks looking to do some shopping or whatever.
I suppose it might not work, but it’s worth giving it a try, and if we can help Arsenal friendly small businesses in these trying times that’d be a good thing.
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For some extra reading this morning, Tim’s column this week takes a look at our misfiring attack, poor individual form, and the system playing its part in that. Check it out here.
For now, I’ll leave you with the Arsecast brought to you by a very exciting new sponsor: all the links you need to listen/subscribe are below. More from me tomorrow.
