6. “A huge investigation revealed that the McDonald’s Monopoly game promotion had been rigged since 1995 and had almost no legitimate winners for the big prizes. Jerry Jacobson — who was head of security for the company that printed the Monopoly game pieces and was in charge of securing and delivering the most valuable ones to McDonald’s packaging plants — was giving winning pieces to friends and family, and later the mafia. Jacobson was arrested in a sting operation that summer and the trial for him and his co-conspirators started on Sept. 10, 2001.”
7. “I lived where the anthrax hit in 2001, just days after 9/11. They had to close down our post office, and for weeks, there was no mail, then finally, bills came radiated and in plastic bags. You couldn’t open any of the mail — it was just stuck together. And this was back in the days before you could pay bills online.”
8. “In Feb. 2001, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling classified info to Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies. He’d been conducting this espionage since 1985. I feel like it was big news for like a month, then died down once he was thrown into a federal supermax prison. I always sort of linked the two, his arrest and 9/11, since they happened the same year.”
9. “The Hainan Island incident in April 2001. A Chinese jet clipped a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane off the coast of China. The jet crashed in the sea, and the US plane made an unauthorized emergency landing in China. It was the first major geopolitical mess of George W. Bush’s presidency. Gave the world a somewhat major incident. I got briefly concerned as a teenager.”
10. “The Nepalese royal massacre on June 1, 2001. Nine members of the royal family were killed in the royal palace, including the King. It was the Crown Prince, who died three days later after being in a coma and being crowned the new king, who was responsible.”
11. “On Sept. 6, 2001, the US government announced that it would not break up Microsoft as a monopoly.”
12. “In the summer of 2001, Fox aired a documentary-styled murder mystery reality show called Murder In Small Town X. The finale aired just a week before 9/11. The winner of the first and only season, Angel Juarbe Jr., was a firefighter, and he was one of the first responders at the World Trade Center and died. With so much else that happened on 9/11, one of the victims, being a reality TV star, was surprisingly rarely brought up.”
13. “The movie Zoolander flopped, relatively speaking, at the box office because it came out right after 9/11.”
14. “Not ‘crazy’ by any stretch, but I remember that the first time after 9/11 that the top story on the news wasn’t in any way related to it was the death of George Harrison in November.”
15. “Cantor Fitzgerald, who had offices in the World Trade Center, represented the single largest loss among any single organization in the attacks.”
16. “The OG iPod launched in October.”
17. “The Boston Globe had all the information ready to release, uncovering the rampant sex abuse being covered up by the Catholic Church. After 9/11, they decided to wait to release it.”
18. “Thuy Trang (the Yellow Power Ranger from Might Morphin’ Power Rangers) passed away in a car accident on Sept. 3, 2001. I was a big MMPR fan, and I don’t remember hearing about that.”
19. “There were several shark attacks in the US that summer, leading Time magazine to dub it the ‘Summer of the Shark.’ There was a ton of news coverage about it.”
20. “There were investigative articles about Bernie Madoff in 2001, that questioned how legitimate his assets were. They were ignored, which allowed him to further commit fraud until the Great Recession.”
21. “Aaliyah died on Aug. 25, 2001. I feel like we didn’t even get to grieve her, and then 9/11 happened.”
22. “Michael Jackson released an album [his last] two weeks earlier. Actually, now that I think about it — Michael was supposed to be in one of the towers that day for a meeting but overslept.”
23. And lastly, “The original teaser trailer for the first Raimi Spider-Man was quickly buried for showing a helicopter trapped in a web between the two towers.”
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