In 2008, the world was a different place.
In 2008, the year of your birth, the top selling movie was The Dark Knight. People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the poster.
Do you know who won the Oscars that year? The academy award for the best movie went to Slumdog Millionaire. The Oscar for best foreign movie that year went to Departures. The top actor was Sean Penn for his role as Harvey Milk in Milk. The top actress was Kate Winslet for her role as Hanna Schmitz in The Reader. The best director? Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire.
In the year 2008, the time when you arrived on this planet, books were still popularly read on paper, not on digital devices. Trees were felled to get the word out. The number one US bestseller of the time was The Appeal by John Grisham. Oh, that's many years ago. Have you read that book? Have you heard of it? Look at the cover!
In 2008... The price of petroleum hits $100 per barrel for the first time. The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope is launched. Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. A peace deal ends the Kivu war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rebels attack the capital of Chad, N'Djamena. Fidel Castro announces his resignation as President of Cuba. Demonstrations by Tibetan separatists turn violent as rioters target government and Han Chinese-owned buildings. NASA's Phoenix spacecraft becomes the first to land on the northern polar region of Mars. Pirates hijack German, Iranian, and Japanese cargo ships off the coast of Somalia. Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the successor to the Nintendo GameCube's best-selling game, Super Smash Bros. Melee, was released in Japan for the Wii. The proton beam is circulated for the first time in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, located at CERN, near Geneva, under the Franco-Swiss border. The video game of the day was Super Smash Bros Brawl.
That was the world you were born into. Since then, you and others have changed it.
The Nobel prize for Literature that year went to J. M. G. Le Clézio. The Nobel Peace prize went to Martti Ahtisaari. The Nobel prize for physics went to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa from Japan for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. The sensation this created was big. But it didn't stop the planets from spinning, on and on, year by year. Years in which you would grow bigger, older, smarter, and, if you were lucky, sometimes wiser. Years in which you also lost some things. Possessions got misplaced. Memories faded. Friends parted ways. The best friends, you tried to hold on. This is what counts in life, isn't it?
The 2000s were indeed a special decade. Globalization continues to influence the world. Islamist groups are on the rise. The European Union further integrates and expands in Europe. A global financial crisis occurs. The US leadership declares a "War on Terror". The Arab-Israeli conflict continues. The second Congo War takes place. Kosovo gains independence from Serbia. Google becomes the web's most visited site. Other sites on the rise include YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. VHS collections become replaced with DVD. Touchscreen mobile phones gain popularity. Microsoft releases operating system Windows XP. The Chinese launch their first manned space flight, Shenzhou 5. Climate change and global warming become household words, while the global temperature keeps growing. The best-selling album of the decade is the Beatles compilation album. Michael Jackson dies. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films capture the imagination of audiences across the globe. Michael Schumacher wins five F1 World Championships before he retires. Taipei 101 becomes the tallest building in the world.
6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... it's 2008. There's TV noise coming from the second floor. Someone turned up the volume way too high. The sun is burning from above. These were different times. The show playing on TV is Phineas and Ferb. The sun goes down. Someone switches channels. There's Lipstick Jungle on now. That's the world you were born in.
Progress, year after year. Do you wonder where the world is heading towards?
It's 2011.
The world is a different place.
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