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🎧 iTunes hits one billion downloads
Apple celebrates its billionth song purchase, officially crowning digital downloads king. The lucky buyer scores iPods, an iMac and bragging rights while white earbuds dominate buses everywhere.

💷 Britain’s biggest heist pulls movie-level chaos
A gang posing as police kidnap a cash depot manager and his family, storm a Securitas depot and roll out with nearly £53 million, smashing UK robbery records. With nicknames like ‘Stopwatch’ and prosthetic disguises straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, it feels cinematic… except families were held hostage and millions are still missing today.

🧬 Funeral homes caught in body parts scandal
A New Jersey company is accused of secretly harvesting bones and tissue from corpses without consent, selling them into medical supply chains worldwide. Thousands of patients unknowingly receive improperly sourced tissue and families discover their loved ones weren’t left to rest intact. One of the decade’s creepiest real-life scandals.

💃 Strip club heartbreak hits radio
T-Pain’s “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” storms charts, mixing Auto-Tune hooks with surprisingly emotional strip-club romance. It launches T-Pain’s hit-making run and quietly introduces the sound that’ll dominate pop for years.

🐕 Antarctica’s goodest boys steal hearts
Eight Below turns sled dogs into survival heroes as abandoned pups battle Antarctic winter until Paul Walker’s guilt-fuelled rescue mission kicks in. Families cry, dogs become instant heroes and the box office happily cashes in.

🐶 Marley melts hearts (and sparks debate)
Marley & Me climbs bestseller charts, telling the story of the world’s naughtiest Labrador and the family who loves him anyway. Readers laugh, cry and then argue online about whether Marley or his owners were the real problem.

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Rewind to 12 – 18 Feb 2006

💔 James Blunt makes everyone emotional
“You’re Beautiful” becomes unavoidable worldwide, fuelling bus-window daydreams and breakup playlists everywhere. Turns out it’s actually about awkward obsession, not romance, but that doesn’t stop it becoming the ultimate sad-boy anthem.

🇮🇩 Bali Nine sentences shock Australia
Courts in Bali hand down sentences to the Bali Nine, with Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran receiving the death penalty and the rest facing life behind bars. Australia debates capital punishment, AFP involvement and whether young Aussies truly understand overseas drug laws, while Bali holidays suddenly come with very serious warnings.

🎤 Breaking Free breaks Disney kids’ hearts
High School Musical anthem ‘Breaking Free’ dominates airwaves, school concerts and bedroom singalongs… then fans discover Zac Efron didn’t sing most of Troy’s parts. Cue tween betrayal, magazine outrage and Disney quietly fixing things for the sequel.

🕵️ Beyoncé solves crimes in pink
The Pink Panther reboot hits cinemas with Steve Martin’s chaotic Clouseau and Beyoncé’s pop-star glamour stealing attention. Critics roll their eyes but audiences show up, and “Check On It” ends up bigger than the movie anyway.

📱 Stephen King says your phone will kill you
King’s new novel Cell imagines a world-ending signal sent through mobile phones, turning users into violent zombies. Some fans love it, others roast it mercilessly, but everyone agrees: mid-2000s tech anxiety was very real.

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Rewind to 5 Feb 2006 to 11 Feb 2006

🦆 Dick Cheney shoots a guy
The Vice President accidentally shoots a man during a quail hunt and the White House somehow lets a local newspaper break the story first. No immediate apology, maximum spin and then the plot twist: the man who got shot goes on TV to apologise to Cheney.

🚗 Britney drives into tabloid meltdown
Photos surface of Britney Spears driving with baby Sean Preston on her lap and the media absolutely loses its mind. Cue wall-to-wall outrage, parenting hot takes and zero empathy for paparazzi panic.

🏈 Super Bowl XL, ref edition
The Steelers beat the Seahawks but the real headline is the officiating. Seahawks fans never recover, conspiracy theories are born and the game earns its forever nickname: Ref Bowl XL.

🕯️ Biggie lives on in the club
‘Nasty Girl’ keeps climbing, proving posthumous hits can still be engineered for the mid-2000s dance floor. Glossy, label-driven and very much a product of its time.

🎸 Johnny Cash goes prestige
Walk the Line turns music biopics into serious business and makes everyone briefly obsessed with Johnny Cash again.

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Rewind to 29 Jan 2006 to 4 Feb 2006

🇺🇸 State of the Union goes full time capsule
George W. Bush lays out a world obsessed with terrorism, addicted to oil, anxious about immigration and still debating same-sex marriage as a “values” issue. Katrina barely gets airtime, healthcare is a shopping experience and the war on terror is framed as the defining mission. 2006 politics hits very differently in 2026.

🔥 Cartoons spark global chaos
Danish Muhammad cartoons explode into worldwide protests, embassy firebombings and a massive debate over free speech vs religious respect. What started as newspaper drawings becomes a flashpoint for geopolitics, identity and everything simmering post-9/11.

🎧 Eminem says goodbye
“When I’m Gone” lands as a tear-soaked semi-retirement anthem, with Em wrestling with fame, addiction and fatherhood. Fans think this might be it. Spoiler: it is and it isn’t.

🧑‍🎤 Arctic Monkeys break the internet
Their second single drops after MySpace and file-sharing hype built a fanbase before the label even clocked it. Peak indie sleaze energy powered by MSN Messenger and dodgy MP3s.

👩‍🍼 Big Momma returns bigger
Big Momma’s House 2 hits #1 with disguises, nanny chaos and jokes that absolutely would not survive a 2026 Twitter thread. Critics hated it. Audiences did not care.

📚 Mystery books and one-star rage
Alphabet-crime thrillers top the charts and our readers lose their minds over foul language, unsatisfying endings and unanswered questions.

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Rewind to 22 Jan 2006 to 28 Jan 2006

🎤 High school musical rewires your personality
Disney drops a made-for-TV movie and accidentally creates a global tween religion. Zac Efron becomes your entire emotional support system, Sharpay steals every scene and ‘We’re All In This Together’ is suddenly being belted at school assemblies by kids who previously refused to raise their hand in class.

🕵️ Fake rock, real spies
Russia accuses British diplomats of spying with… a hollow rock full of electronics. Agents crouch to ‘tie their shoelaces’ while secretly uploading data. The UK denies everything. Everyone pretends this is normal diplomatic behaviour and not the plot of a rejected Bond film.

📧 Spam king gets wrecked
AOL sues notorious spammer Christopher Smith for clogging inboxes with miracle pills and ‘urgent business proposals’ and wins US$5.3 million. The CAN-SPAM Act finally swings into action and somewhere a Hotmail inbox breathes a small exhausted sigh of relief.

🦷 Grillz go mainstream
Nelly’s Grillz hits #1 in the US, officially turning dental jewellery into a cultural event. Suddenly everyone knows a guy who can get them ‘done cheap’ and your cousin is Googling ‘gold teeth near me’ on dial-up.

🧛 Leather, lore and Kate Beckinsale
Underworld: Evolution rules the US box office with slow-mo gun fights, ancient vampire drama and industrial blue-grey vibes while Memoirs of a Geisha enchants Australia with sweeping tragedy, Oscar buzz and very complicated cultural conversations.

🎬 Disney buys the future
Disney announces it’s buying Pixar for US$7.4 billion and accidentally sets up the next decade of Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Inside Out and Frozen. Bob Iger chooses the smartest cheat code in media history.

📚 The book everyone pretends to like
The Hostage tops the charts and delivers 700 pages of government meetings, diplomatic intrigue and one-star reviews begging for mercy. Thrilling if you love bureaucracy.

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🧻 Wikitorial wipeout. The LA Times tried letting the public edit their editorials. What they got instead? Porn, profanity and chaos in 36 hours. A short-lived democracy, quickly replaced by Ctrl+Alt+Nope.

🦇 Batman begins again. Christopher Nolan ditches the bat-nipples and gives us trauma, ninjas and a Batmobile that could eat your SUV. Christian Bale growls, Katie Holmes dodges bats and superhero movies grow the hell up.

🧢 Ned Kelly gets heritage listed. Glenrowan, site of Ned Kelly’s final standoff, gets heritage status and an unofficial side hustle in car decals, mailbox toppers and calf tattoos that say “such is life.” Iconic outlaw, small-town merch king.

📻 Open up the boombox! We dissect the old addage, 'if it's not one thing, it's another!' as we air your boomer complaints.

🎮 Xbox 360 arrives. And so does Sid, the kid! Launch day chaos as the 360 sells out in hours. HD gaming, Xbox Live 2.0, achievements — and soon the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Microsoft’s win… with a billion-dollar asterisk.

🧪 Two Aussies, one Nobel and a beaker of bacteria. On a snowy Stockholm night, Dr Robin Warren and Professor Barry Marshall rewrite medical history — and humiliate decades of gastro dogma — by winning the Nobel Prize for proving stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress or spicy food. Marshall seals the legend by drinking Helicobacter pylori like it’s a schooner at the pub, getting sick, then curing himself with antibiotics. It’s the most chaotic, iconic, unbelievably Australian science story ever told.

🐸 A Frog is born (and it feels good, man). November 2005 saw the debut of Matt Furie’s comic Boy’s Club — and with it, the birth of Pepe the Frog. Back then, he was just a chill stoner amphibian with bad aim and good vibes. Twenty years later, he’s meme history — proof that even frogs can’t escape the internet’s chaos.

🐥 Chicken Little takes flight. Disney went fully digital for the first time without Pixar and served up Chicken Little, starring Zach Braff as the sky-is-falling featherball. It made $315 million, confused adults, delighted kids, and marked the moment Disney said “we can animate on our own!” (spoiler: not quite yet).

📚 Outlander gets extra saucy. A Breath of Snow and Ashes drops, and readers drown in time-travel, romance, and kilted chaos. Critics beg for fewer butts, more plot. Claire and Jamie? Still can’t keep their hands off each other.

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🐶 Who’s a cloned boy? Snuppy the Afghan hound becomes the world’s first cloned dog, born after 1,000 embryos, 123 surrogates and more ethical debates than a philosophy major on Red Bull.

🎤 Mariah's not-so-comeback. The Emancipation of Mimi drops and Mariah Carey reminds us she never left — she just needed a minute, some stiletto cardio and 14 guest producers. We Belong Together = world domination.

🚋 Tram Boy’s joyride. A 14-year-old Melbourne teen hijacked a Yarra Tram and drove it like a seasoned pro—manual track switches, passenger pickups, even PA announcements. His smooth run ended in a high-drama arrest and he became an instant folk hero.

🧢 Jay-Z drops luxury time bombs. Hov teamed up with Audemars Piguet to launch his own Royal Oak watch line with only 100 made. If you snagged one in 2005, it came with a preloaded iPod and a truckload of clout. Today? You’re sitting on six figures, easy.

Tatts all folks! Tattoos from the early 2000s are making a comeback and we're wondering if they ever went out of style! 📣 B-A-N-A-N-A-S.Gwen Stefani clapped back at Courtney Love with a cheerleader chant for the ages. Hollaback Girl hit the charts and took over high school halls everywhere. You couldn’t escape it — not in gym class, not at prom and definitely not on your Motorola RAZR ringtone.

⏳ Flashback within a flashback... within a 'best of' episode! T minus 20 gets meta as we throw back to a time when we were babies on the radio with none other than the man who inspired the character of Kramer from the hit show Seinfeld.

📺 Logies, lies and live TV glitches. The 2005 Logies were the chaos we deserved. Rove won everything (again), Chris Hemsworth got his moment and Channel Nine lost the broadcast right before announcing the Gold Logie winner. Also, shout-out to the whitegoods prize pack from voting - nothing says Aussie TV like a blender with your ballot.

🐕 And do kids even get chased by dogs anymore? We tackle the big questions when we open up the boom box.

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🧃 Belle Gibson enters Mel’s comments section

In one of the most unexpectedly cursed timeline moments of the year, Mel gets fact-checked by Belle Gibson — yes, that Belle Gibson — after she jumps into Mel’s Instagram comments to correct something she said. A wellness grifter policing accuracy is peak internet irony and a reminder that sometimes the comments section really is the wild west. No green juice was harmed but Mel’s disbelief absolutely was.

🐊 The internet’s first viral earworm (thanks, Schnappi)

Before TikTok, before YouTube ads, before your sanity… there was a dancing cartoon crocodile singing in German. We revisit Schnappi, the accidental global hit that proved the internet could launch nonsense into the stratosphere — and never look back.

🎧 Boomer ASMR: guess that nostalgic sound

From dial-up tones to Windows error dings, we play the most chaotic game imaginable — identifying tech and pop culture relics by sound alone. It’s soothing, triggering and wildly humbling for everyone involved.

⚛️ Did we almost create a black hole?

Remember when the world briefly panicked that a particle collider might end existence as we know it? Same. We revisit the week science headlines went full apocalypse and somehow lived to tell the tale.

💔 Delta, Brian McFadden and peak tabloid side-eye

A sharp rewind to the moment Australian pop culture turned extremely judgmental, as Delta Goodrem found herself unfairly labelled a homewrecker. A reminder that 2005 tabloids had absolutely no chill.

🕊️ A pope dies, smoke rises and the world watches

White smoke, black smoke and global anticipation as the Vatican farewells Pope John Paul II. A rare moment when the entire planet paused to watch a chimney.

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