(Newser)
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Labor Day traditionally marks the end of summer, and the last day of this exhausting season couldn't come soon enough, writes Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal. The weather's been lousy, the movies were mediocre, and Jon and Kate somehow convinced the nation that they mattered. And don't mention politics; what with town hall brawls and sputtering health reform, we needed "the peregrinatory Lothario Mark Sanford and that prickly cop up in Cambridge" to cheer us up.
"This is the summer when nothing exciting happened," Queenan writes, a season so deficient that even Joe Biden didn't make a single gaffe. A new Apple OS and a new Woodstock were pale retreads, and "the seen-it-before sense was particularly acute in the movies": another Terminator, another Harry Potter, another X-Men. This summer only Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett or Ted Kennedy excited us—but death, "even at the highest levels, is no substitute for good clean fun."
