Pop Culture Facts & History:
2000 was the first year Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all 50 states.
In October 2000, Heinz introduced colored ketchup products called EZ Squirt, which eventually included green (2000), purple (2001), mystery (pink, orange, or teal, 2002), and blue (2003). In 2006, the products were discontinued.
There have been two wooden looping roller coasters in history, one built in 1895 (Flip Flap Railway at Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, closed 1902) and the other in 2000 (Son of Beast at Kings Island in Mason, Ohio, closed 2009).
November 2, 2000 was the last time humans were simultaneously on earth. Ever since then, the ISS has been occupied continuously.
Coca-Cola settled at a trial, where they were accused of discrimination in pay, promotions and performance evaluations towards African-American employees. They agreed to a $192 million settlement in corporate racial discrimination, the largest settlement ever.
In 2000, author J.K. Rowling gave her father the first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for Father’s Day and signed it: “Lots of love from your firstborn.” Three years later, he sold it for £27,500.
For centuries, there was a secret wing at the Naples National Archaeological Museum, where all the erotic art found in Pompeii was locked away. The cabinet remained closed for over a hundred years, with the doorway even bricked up at one point, and was only fully opened to the public in 2000.
NASA spacecraft ‘Deep Impact’ is lost in space, as NASA lost communication with it due to a similar problem to the Y2K bug. It was lost less than a second after January 1st, 2000 – most likely because the time tracker onboard had overflowed.
In 2000, an American-British consortium offered $250 million to each of the group’s four members to reunite, but they turned down the offer.
Danish citizen, Stig Severinsen, held his breath for over twenty minutes while submerged in a tank filled with sharks.
A Brazilian electronics company, Gradiente, is legally allowed to call their phone ‘iPhone’ because they trademarked the word in 2000, 7 years before Apple’s iPhone. They share the name with Apple, although they are different products.
Air travel was practically unaffected on January 1, 2000, even though there was a fair amount of panic about the Y2K bug.
The country of Tuvalu could not join the United Nations until 2000, because it did not have the $100,000 fee to join. Tuvalu began selling its domain name of .tv to companies to make most of that country’s money.
The lowest PGA score of 63 played by Jose Maria Olazabal.
Spain’s Paralympic basketball team was ordered to return their gold medals won in Sydney after nearly all of their players were found to have no disability at all.
Two Egyptologists found that a 2,700-year-old 27-inch statue of King Taharqa was unknowingly being used as a bike rack by staff in the basement of a Southampton museum. It had been ignored for a century.
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton got married on May 5, 2000.
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were married on July 29, 2000
After nearly two weeks of planning, Pop Culture Madness.com went online on January 8, 2000.
The highest-grossing stop-motion animated film is Chicken Run (2000, $106,834,564), beating out The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Strictly speaking, the “20th Century” didn’t end until December 31, 2000.
Ten members of the Spanish Paralympic basketball team were ordered to hand back their 2000 Sydney Games gold medals after it was revealed that they had no intellectual disability.
A 2000 study of the Library of Congress suggested that the amount of uncompressed textual data represented by the 26 million books then in the collection was 10 terabytes.
In the year 2000, about 37 percent of Earth’s land area was agricultural land.
All arcade games imported into North America from 1989 to 2000 had the following FBI slogan included into their attract mode: “Winners Don’t Use Drugs”.
In post-war America, (1950s and 1960s) Americans were told that by the year 2000 the normal work week would be 20-30 hours, and people would be committing suicide from boredom.
Millennials are not people born after the 2000s as a lot of people seem to think. Actually it ranges from people born from 1980 until 2000!
In 2000 a mining company in Mexico discovered a cave filled with giant crystals under the Sierra de Naica Mountain.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had four reactors and only one was impacted by the 1986 meltdown; the others continued producing power for several years and one (Reactor No. 3) produced power until it was decommissioned in 2000.
405 is a three-minute film released in June 2000 had a budget of $300. It was the first “viral video”. $140 was to pay two tickets for walking on the highway shoulder while filming. It was issued to them by California Highway Patrol Officer Dana Anderson, who is listed in the “Special Thanks” section of the credits. The video created by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt.