2009 History, Trivia and Fun Facts

• The Viral Video: JK Wedding Entrance Dance... The wedding procession for Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz of St. Paul, Minnesota, choreographed to the song Forever by Chris Brown.
• The Top Song was I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas
• The Big Movies included Avatar, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Price of a postage stamp in 2009: 44 cents
• Price of a gallon of gas in 2009: $2.40
  XBox360 60GB Pro: $249.00
  Women's Nike running shoe: $84.99/pair
• The World Population was ~ 6,780,000,000
• Silly Bandz were the must-have bracelets for trading and collecting 2009-2011.
• Cali Swag District recorded Teach Me How to Dougie and the line dance song is still often requested today.
• And... Slender Man (Slenderman) is a fictional character that originated as an Internet meme created by Something Awful forums user Victor Surge

Canada passed the "Apology Act", establishing that apologizing to someone after an incident cannot be used in court against the person who apologized to establish their guilt or liability.

Donald Unger cracked his left hand knuckles everyday for 60 years but did not do so on his right hand. Proving that cracking knuckles had no effect on his health he earned a 2009 'Ig Nobel Prize' in Medicine.

The city council of Madison, WI voted to make the plastic lawn flamingo the city's offical bird.

The Guinness World Records 2009 Gamer's Edition lists GTA San Andreas as the videogame with the largest voice cast, with 861 credited voice actors, including 174 actors and 687 additional performers, many of those performers being fans of the series who wanted to appear on the game.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) features voice acting from all four of the original cast members (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson), who helped write the script as well. Aykroyd considers it "essentially the third movie".

10 year old Colby Curtin, suffering from cancer, had a dying wish to watch Pixar's Up, which led to a Pixar employee flying down with a DVD of the movie for a private screening of the film. She died later that night.

The entire main cast of Zombieland (2009) have been nominated for at least one Oscar: Jesse Eisenberg for the Social Network (2010), Emma Stone for Birdman (2014), Woody Harrelson for The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and The Messenger (2009), and Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

Disney considered making 'The Dark Kingdom' at Walt Disney World, a Fifth Park that was themed around it's Villains.

A retired policeman named Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren't related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK named Geraint Woolford.

A 2009 study by psychologist teams at the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Diego, concluded that singer Shania Twain's face possesses the 'golden ratio' - or perfect distances - between a woman's eyes and mouth that determines whether she is thought to be beautiful.

Scientists discovered that a single, ant mega-colony had colonized much of the world on a scale rivaled only by human civilization, including 1 super colony spanning 3,700 miles along the Mediterranean coast.

Chris Hemsworth's first movie role was in Star Trek (2009). He played Kirk's father, George KIrk, who died in the opening sequence of the film.

The producers of 2009's Star Trek hosted a screening in Austin publicized as that of The Wrath of Khan. A few minutes into Khan, the film appeared to melt and Leonard Nimoy appeared on stage with the hosts, asking the audience, "wouldn't you rather see the new movie?" before a preview.

Comedian Eddie Izzard completed 43 marathons in 51 days despite having no history of long-distance running.

One of Google's programmers was adding websites to the malware registry when he accidentally entered "/" instead of a full URL causing the search engine to block off every website in its index including Google's own pages for 55 minutes.

800 years ago, the average UK wage in the year 1209 was £1.93 a year.

Paint Drying: The Movie was a movie made in 2009 consisting only of paint drying, as a rebuttal to critics who mention that they "Would rather watch paint dry" than a particular film.

In 2009 art historian Gergely Barki was watching Stuart Little when he spotted Róbert Berény's Sleeping Lady, a lost painting not seen since an exhibit/sale in 1928. After a years-long mission, he tracked it to an asst set designer's home, who bought the six-figure painting for $500 for the film.

Stephen Colbert won a NASA competition to have a module of the ISS named after him, but NASA opted to name it 'Tranquility' instead. They did, however, name a treadmill on the ISS after him. It is called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.)

A Hungarian art historian, while watching the movie Stuart Little with his daughter, spotted a long-lost avant-garde painting in the background. The painting was bought by a set designer in a Pasadena antiques shop for "next to nothing", and later sold for $285,700 at an auction.

Sony sold 12 million floppy disks- in 2009!

A woman filed a lawsuit against PepsiCo after discovering that the crunchberries in a Cap'n Crunch cereal had not in fact been real fruit. The case was thrown out, with the judge remarking that to do otherwise would "ignore all concepts of personal responsibility and common sense".

On June 28, 2009 Stephen Hawking threw a party for time-travelers. He announced the party the day after it happened, and according to Hawking, no one came.

In the 2009 Philippines floods a teenager named Muelmar Magallanes saved 30 lives. After leaping into the rushing waters to save his family from danger, he repeatedly jumped back in to save others, including a trapped mother and baby, until too tired to fight the current he was swept away.

In 1989 the best paid player in the MLB was paid about $2.76 Million. By 2009, it was $33 Million.

Cost of a Superbowl ad in 2009: $3,000,000

Irish police found they had more than 50 motoring offenses recorded for someone called "Prawo Jadzy". It turned out that Prawo Jadzy means "driving license" in Polish.

The original version of Ain't No Sunshine by Bill Withers did not chart on the UK Singles Chart until 2009, 38 years after its release.

Nintendo DSi, Nintendo DSi XL, Sony's PSP Go, Wii, Dora the EXplorer Links Doll, Mindflex, Barbie Three Musketeers, Rubik's 360, Twilight merchandise, Transformers toys, Zhu Zhu Pets, New Super Mario Bros Wii

Video Games: Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus, Call of Duty: Modern WArfare 2, New Super Maio Brothers Wii

Food Network Magazine began publication

(according to boxofficemojo)
1. Avatar
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
4. The Twighlight Saga: New Moon
5. Up
6. The Hangover
7. Star Trek
8. The Blind Side
9. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
10. Sherlock Holmes

2012, Avatar, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squakquel, The Blind Side, District 9, Fast and Furious, G.I. Joe: The Riose of Cobra, The Hangover, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Monsters Vs. Aliens, Moon, Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, The Proposal, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Up, X-Men Origins: Wolverine