Rewind to 25–30 September 2006, when Facebook opened the gates, Five became four and Jackass once again tested the limits of human anatomy.

📱 Facebook lets everybody in
Got an email address? Congratulations, you can now join Facebook. Just weeks after freaking everyone out with the new News Feed, the former college-only network opens to the general public. Pokes, Walls, relationship-status drama and regrettable photo tags are coming for us all.

🏟️ The Saints come home
Thirteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Saints return to the Superdome. U2 and Green Day perform, 70,000 fans pack the stadium and Steve Gleason's blocked punt helps turn a football game into an unforgettable moment for New Orleans.

🤕 Jackass goes bigger, grosser and considerably less insurable
Jackass Number Two hits cinemas with bulls, snakes, rockets, leeches and Steve-O literally dangling himself as shark bait. Somehow, this was a major studio film.

🦸 Save the cheerleader, save the world
Heroes arrives on NBC and suddenly we're all extremely invested in ordinary people discovering superpowers, Hiro Nakamura yelling "Yatta!" and figuring out exactly what the hell is going on with that cheerleader.

👓 Apparently this is “ugly”
Ugly Betty premieres, introducing America Ferrera as Betty Suarez — a smart, ambitious outsider entering the brutal world of fashion armed with braces, glasses and the apparently unforgivable crime of wearing colourful clothes.

5️⃣ Five are back! All four of them!
Five announce their reunion without Sean Conlon and offer the only explanation necessary: “Five's a brand not a number.” Honestly, no notes.

🤓 White & Nerdy takes over
Weird Al goes Straight Outta Lynwood, turns Chamillionaire's “Ridin'” into “White & Nerdy” and scores the biggest hit of his career — helped by the rapidly growing power of internet video.

📖 Everyone loves a secret society
Brad Meltzer's The Book of Fate brings us assassination attempts, Freemasons, Thomas Jefferson codes and shadowy Washington conspiracies. Because if the mid-2000s taught us anything, it's that every historical building was probably hiding a clue.

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Rewind to 18–24 September 2006, when your car had an ashtray, your phone definitely wasn't connected to it and turning on the interior light was, according to every dad, a jailable offence.

🚗 Booster seats, but make it generational — New child-restraint laws hit Britain, requiring kids to use a booster until age 12 or 135cm. We use it as an excuse to remember the family cars of our childhood: cigarette smoke, manual windows, street directories, station-wagon boot seating and the parental arm across your chest as an emergency restraint.

🚀 Hammond's 300mph horror crash — A Top Gear stunt turns terrifying when Richard Hammond crashes the jet-powered Vampire at nearly 300mph, suffering a serious brain injury in the show's most infamous accident.

🎮 Australia gets Good Game — Junglist and Kapowski plonk themselves on an old ABC couch and launch a show dedicated entirely to video games. What starts on ABC2 becomes a cult institution, spawns Spawn Point and proves gamers might actually watch television when television bothers talking to them.

👖 Chingy's checking out dem jeans — Hoodstar arrives with Pullin' Me Back, Dem Jeans and Chingy's continuing commitment to rhymes that sound suspiciously nursery-adjacent. Naturally, Sing a Song of Sixpence is called in for testing.

🕺 Scissor Sisters don't wanna dance — Elton John plays piano, Jake Shears brings the falsetto and I Don't Feel Like Dancin’ becomes an enormous dancefloor hit despite being explicitly about wanting absolutely no part of the dancefloor.

🏈 The Rock gets serious — Before he was Dwayne Johnson: Global Movie Franchise, The Rock coaches juvenile offenders through American football in Gridiron Gang, while Monster House reminds children that sometimes their irrational fear of the creepy neighbour's house is entirely justified.

📚 Hot mic, cold reception — Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine sends America's favourite breakfast-TV host into crisis after one spectacularly ill-timed hot-mic moment — while Goodreads readers respond with the devastating literary equivalent of a shrug: three stars.

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Rewind to 10–16 September 2006, when Pluto's replacement got a name that perfectly matched the chaos, Michael Schumacher shocked Formula One, Dog the Bounty Hunter found himself on the wrong side of the law and Justin Timberlake proved sexy was, in fact, making a comeback.

🪐 Meet Eris... the planet that wasn't. The object that helped get Pluto kicked out of the planetary club was officially named Eris, the Greek goddess of discord. Fitting, considering astronomers are still arguing about Pluto two decades later. Oh, and it was almost called Xena after the warrior princess. Science really missed an opportunity there.

🏎️ Schumacher says goodbye... sort of. Fresh off a win at Monza, Michael Schumacher announced he'd retire at the end of the season while still chasing an eighth world championship. It felt like the end of an era... until he surprised everyone by coming back a few years later.

🤠 Dog gets collared. Reality TV's most famous bounty hunter, Dog Chapman, was arrested over his role in capturing convicted rapist Andrew Luster in Mexico years earlier. It's one of those wonderfully bizarre headlines where the guy whose whole job is arresting people suddenly needed someone to post his own bail.

🎤 Timberlake brings sexy back. Justin Timberlake dropped FutureSex/LoveSounds, the album that transformed him from former boyband heartthrob into one of pop's biggest solo stars. "SexyBack", "My Love", "What Goes Around... Comes Around"—it wasn't just an album, it was a cultural reset powered by Timbaland beats.

🧙 Pretty boys with powers. The Covenant hit cinemas with magic, muscles and enough Abercrombie energy to power an entire shopping centre. Critics rolled their eyes, but hindsight has been much kinder to this gloriously over-the-top supernatural teen flick packed with future stars.

💔 Operation: John Tucker Must Die. Before revenge plots unfolded via Instagram Stories, four girls teamed up to destroy the school's biggest heartbreaker the old-fashioned way. Flip phones, pop-punk and deliciously petty payback—it doesn't get much more 2006 than that.

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