Today, I want to talk about a shop in Driffield. As you can see from the photo above that I nicked from Google (thanks to The Local Data Company who apparently took it or at least own the copyright to it), it’s called AW Smithson. Actually, its official name is AW Smithson Home and Garden, which might sound like the kind of place you’d expect to see Rudy Giuliani giving a press conference outside, but it’s actually a shop where you can purchase curios and collectibles — a junk shop, if you want to be less kind. Which I do.
But what is my beef with this place?
Well, regular viewers of my Instagram account will know that I’ve been posting photos of signs the owners of this shop have been putting in their window for several months. What exactly is the nature of these signs? Let’s have a look.
Next slide please.
So, “the media is the virus”, is it? And seemingly, it’s those pesky Mainstream Media types who are to blame — I’m sure the proprietors refer to them as the “Lamestream Media” behind closed doors whilst guffawing heavily and high fiving each other. Only one printed form of media gets a mention, but why The Guardian? It’s pretty obvious, really. They’ve named the most prominent left wing newspaper and accused it of spreading misinformation. Aww, how Trumpian. They could have gone for the Mirror, but that would perhaps have been less obvious. The implication here is that the right wing media are much more reliable, such as these examples of incredibly accurate weather reporting:
And this not-at-all-misleading effort from the Daily Mail:
No, not the bit about the Queen. In the publication’s partial defence, an MP had made this claim the previous day, but that doesn’t excuse the Mail from printing it as fact. Turkey will never join the EU because Greece will always veto the move. And even if somehow Turkey did join the EU, perhaps if Greece left or the veto rule were to be removed, as the Daily Mail possibly also claimed here, along with the “fact” that every nation was going to be forced to join an EU Super Army and that countries who hadn’t yet adopted the euro would be forced to, how can a number be attributed to how many people would come here? It seems incredibly specific while being based on absolutely nothing. And this might come as news to the gammons, but there are probably already more than 1.5 million Turks in this country. Who do they think is making the delicious kebabs they like to eat after a night down the pub drinking classic British beers like Stella Artois while singing Land of Hope and Glory after watching 22 non-English footballers from two clubs owned by foreign investors face each other in a cup competition which is sponsored by a Thai energy drink?
But what about the TV media which is mentioned? Oh yes, all these channels have “left wing bias”, don’t they? The BBC famously never called Jezza “Comrade Corbyn” and used a graphic of him in Red Square which implied he was a communist and they’ve absolutely NEVER repeatedly invited Trump sycophant and EU-hating migrant-baiter, Nigel Farage, on to Question Time and a host of other programmes. It’s the anti-Brexit style of reporting which makes them left wing though, isn’t it? Never mind that they’ve simply reported things as they have happened throughout, i.e. nothing positive about Brexit has yet come to light (unless you count blue passports, ex-pats having their freedom of movement restricted and the value of the pound plummeting to a record low), so they haven’t reported it as such, instead focusing on the negative aspects, such as increases in food prices and Kent becoming a gigantic car park. And anyway, how is Brexit a left or right issue? Some of those who voted for it might as well just admit that their primary motivation for doing so was because they don’t like too many brown people knocking about. Unless they voted from a Socialist Worker standpoint, which was a “revolt against the rich”. Yes, because prominent trade unionist, Len McCluskey, who reportedly earns £140,000 a year and once borrowed £400,000 from Unite to purchase a home and then paid said loan off with alarming speed, is a real man of the people and an absolute fucking paragon of socialism.
But anyway, the media isn’t there to blow smoke up the collective arses of Johnson et al. Proper media should hold them all to account, which most of the TV channels mentioned on the sign have done. ITV are feeding misinformation when Piers Morgan has torn apart every government official who’s been on breakfast TV for the lies they’ve told? Don’t make me laugh.
So based on the fact that the media are to blame, not the most right wing government this country has ever had, who are providing most of the information to the various media outlets, I deduce that the owners of the shop are right wing conspiracy theory nutjobs. Presumably they get all their news from Breitbart or Infowars and think that QAnon is forward thinking and they like to scour the internet for the latest news on 5G theories while posting comments on 4Chan message boards demanding that Obama produce his birth certificate. Yes, we absolutely shouldn’t listen to independent scientists who all the media mentioned on the sign have used to verify COVID information, because they obviously have some kind of agenda. Does science have an agenda? No, there is no right and left science, only right and wrong science.
After a while, the shop displayed these signs in its window:
I know, right?
More recently, this appeared:
It’s interesting that they claim to “go by facts and data” when the facts and data readily available to everyone in the form of dictionaries would inform them that they’d spelled muzzle wrong. And it’s the use of language here that’s the problem. Calling it a muzzle rather than a mask shows that they believe it’s constricting, it’s taking away their freedom and it’s an affront to human rights or something. Mate, it’s a mask. You can still breathe while you’re wearing it. A damn sight better than if you were hooked up to a ventilator anyway.
But despite all this, there’s a sign on the door saying that social distancing is observed in the shop, which is difficult considering the shape and size of the small premises and the amount of junk stacked up within, and this is helpfully demonstrated with a two headed arrow which has “2 metres” written above it. So do they believe in the threat of this disease or not? It seems that it might well be Schrödingers virus, simultaneously the greatest ever threat to humanity and a load of absolute bollocks.
Finally, we have this:
Helped out by the fact that surely the past few weeks HAVE taught us, rather than has taught us, this is a colossal self-own. If ever there was an epicentre of covidiocy, it’s certainly this shop.
