Happy Ed Balls Day!
If you’re not familiar with Ed Balls Day, we are more than happy to fill in the details for you.
It’s one of those things that happens by accident on the internet and then turns into a wonderfully weird tradition.
To start: Ed Balls is a real person, and that is really his name.
Back in 2011, he was a member of the UK’s Parliament, a leader in the opposition party.
Back then Twitter was still a somewhat new platform, at least for politicians, so a staffer suggested that Ed Balls try searching his own name to see what people were tweeting about him.
Ed Balls opened up the Twitter app on his Blackberry and typed “Ed Balls” into the search bar and clicked search.
Or so he thought.
Actually, he typed “Ed Balls” into where you Tweet.
And then he clicked send.
So the entire tweet from Ed Balls read “Ed Balls.”
And when something like that happens online, Twitter users can’t help but love it, especially when it happens to someone named Ed Balls.
As Ed Balls himself noted, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if he was named Ed Smith.
Each year on April 28, people on Twitter have marked the anniversary of the tweet by declaring it Ed Balls Day.
One of the people who has marked Ed Balls Day each year: Ed Balls himself.
He’s posted photos of himself with big bags of soccer balls, he’s done videos where he explains how to calculate the volume of a ball, he’s even posted photos of cakes that people have decorated to look just like his famous tweet.
And while he’s not a lawmaker anymore, he’s used his online fame to speak up for people who, like him, grew up with a stutter or stammer.
So it’s one of those rare moments where people come together over somebody’s tweet and it’s actually kind of nice.
To which we can only say: Ed Balls.
It’s also Arbor Day in most places.
And here’s a story from the “one person can make a difference” desk.
In 2022, Antoine Moses of Quebec set a world record by planting 23,060 trees in a single 24 hour period.
If you’re not up for that, just do one tree a day for 23,060 days.
Ed Balls Day Is Upon Us! Here Are the 8 Strangest Online Political Gaffes (Snopes)
Quebecer breaks Guinness world record, planting more than 23K trees in 24 hours (Globalnews.ca)
