It's February. We're deep in the doldrums of winter. It would seem like the perfect time for a weird viral phenomenon to distract us from the lousy weather — and we've got one of the weirder ones yet.
It's February. We're deep in the doldrums of winter. It would seem like the perfect time for a weird viral phenomenon to distract us from the lousy weather — and we've got one of the weirder ones yet.
Usually, we're only interested in brooms for sweeping, or maybe to dress up like a witch, but they're central to the new phenomenon. I guess anything's better than Tide pods.
The beginning of this challenge is murky. Some say that NASA claimed in a quickly-deleted tweet that February 10, 2020, was the only day that brooms could stand up on their own.
From random Twitter people to random Twitter dogs, everyone seemed to be doing it, all under the vague idea that NASA had somehow challenged them to do so.
Like any viral phenomenon, tweets alternated between the earnest folks trying the challenge for themselves, and those who were too cool for school and found ways to cast shade.
Coach Burns' tweet was in jest (I hope). But nevertheless, everyone seemed to be able to balance a broomstick on February 10th. Maybe it was, like, swamp gases and gravitational pull or something?
A third subset of Twitter reactions followed a template like this — basically saying they'd been wise to the phenomenon all along, but never thought it was cool enough to bring up until now.
As they're wont to do, bush-league sports teams jumped on the trending hashtag in a bid to win social media engagement. This isn't a broom, but the fact that it's a hockey stick almost makes it more impressive.
There must have been extra gravitational pull going on in this store to enable these folks to create a veritable maze of self-supporting broomsticks.
Maybe everyone's got a touch of winter-induced cabin fever. Maybe internet trends have hit a new nadir. Regardless, the broomstick challenge blew up.
Some accounts with actual scientific and astronomy know-how eventually decided that enough was enough, telling everyone that you can balance a broomstick any old day of the year if you care to do so.
This is probably the dumbest thing an astronaut and a scientist have ever had to team up to prove, but NASA did, in fact, prove that broomstick balancing is a normal thing.
After the cinnamon challenge and after Tide pods, the broomstick challenge actually seems wholesome and safe. We'll see if it returns on February 10, 2021.