Quizzes & Puzzles

Those Were the Days My Friends – the Noughties

OK, another quiz from the Noughties, this time on world events. We’ve even given you the answers - the years 2000 through to 2009. All you have to do is stick each one in the right box.

Answers next month, where you can award yourself three big ones if you get the year dead right, and one point if you’re out by a year either side.

World Events / The Year?
Albert II, Price of Monaco, becomes the first reigning monarch to go to the North Pole, and Slobodan Milosevic is found dead in his cell at the UN war crimes tribunal’s detention centre in The Hague. Tens of thousands of his supporters attend a farewell ceremony in Belgrade, simply confirming what we already know, that the Balkans issues are going to fester for a long time yet. George Dubya greets Tony Blair with the phrase “Yo Blair” – does he think this is Tony’s Christian name, presumably confused by America’s penchant for reversing first names and surnames, e.g. Payne Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Dean Martin. It’s not impossible, y’know. Ireland commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising.
The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The first identified case of SARS occurs in Vietnam (although it is believed the virus originates from China) – both patient and doctor die from the disease shortly afterwards. The last VW Type 1 (the Beetle) rolls off the production line in Mexico. The lights go out in Times Square as a massive power outage causes a 24-hour blackout in NYC and much of north-eastern America.
Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans when the levee breaks, and YouTube goes on-line. At the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park Pink Floyd’s DSOTM line-up performs together for the first time in 24 years, and for the final time. Interestingly megalomaniac and control freak Roger Waters seems most keen to let bygones be bygones. North Korean males are urged to trim their hair “in accordance with Socialist lifestyle” in order to combat the negative effects of long hair on human intelligence development.
Holy cow! Hysteria in the US as the price of a gallon of gas (petrol to you and me) hits $4. In the UK we are paying the equivalent of $10 per gallon with barely a murmur of dissent. Fidel Castro resigns as President of Cuba, Bill Gates steps down from his day to day duties as Chairman of Microsoft to become a philanthropist, and subprime mortgages hit the fan…big time.
US Airways Flight 1549 ditches shortly after take-off in the Hudson River with, miraculously, no fatalities. To the amusement of Cod War veterans the Icelandic government and banking system collapses, but – more importantly – short-arsed sex giant Tom Jones is No. 1 for the first time since 1966 as he appears on the Comic Relief hit Islands in the Stream.
The Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean generates waves up to 30 metres high and is ultimately the cause of over 225,000 deaths in 11 countries. The RMS Queen Mary II, the largest passenger liner afloat, makes its maiden voyage, while John Kerry wins the US Democratic Party presidential nomination. In Ireland large-scale street gatherings become the “latest thing” as smoking is banned from all work places, including bars and pubs.
Most of the EEC adopts the Euro. Queen Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee is marred somewhat by the passing of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. And after some legal wrangling the WWF becomes the WWE, to avoid confusion with the WWF…
9/11, New York City. John Prescott becomes a serious contender for world boxing heavyweight crown after flattening a heckler with a single punch in Rhyl, North Wales.
Catastrophic global destruction draws closer as the Doomsday Clock is advanced from seven to five minutes before midnight. Nicholas Sarkozy wins the French presidential election, and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner becomes the first female elected president of Argentina. The final Harry Potter book is released, selling a record-breaking eleven million copies in the first 24 hours. Benazir Bhutto is assassinated in Pakistan.
The Queen Mother celebrates her 100th birthday, and this year includes the final day (to date) when there is no human presence in space. (The International Space Station has been continuously crewed since.) Transport woes with the Hatfield rail crash, and an Air France Concorde crashes on take-off from Paris, killing all 109 on board and four on the ground.

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