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Summer Summary: Why We’ll Remember June-September 2004
(Not an Exhaustive List)

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Sadly, summer is over. Or perhaps it’s not so sad – now that fall is here, we finally have a shot at ousting Bush, which many of us (New Yorkers especially, it's true), is more important than just about anything. And so we have to relinquish summer. But rather than toasting to mojitos and flip-flops, let’s take a look at what this past summer was really all about, shall we...

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- Hurricanes: I’ve lost count. But they’ve been frequent and they’ve been furious.

- Jim McGreevey: It was such a prosaic day. The local news was on, but just to provide white noise. But even when you aren’t paying attention, it’s impossible to not have your ears perk up when out of the corner of your eye you see a man at a podium saying, “I am a gay American.” It was more perplexing than anything, really. And the wife just standing there in the back, and the fact that he said “gay American” instead of just “gay,” as if gay Americans are somehow more noble than gay, say, Germans.

- Shrek 2: It took in over $430 million at the box office this summer, becoming the third-highest grossing movie of all time. Odd, just odd. And apparently general movie audiences were paying no heed to Me Three reviews.

- People started going to Webster Hall again (New York-specific). It was only a matter of time before it had been uncool for long enough to become ripe for a retro moment.

- Michael Phelps became the goofiest-looking Olympic heartthrob ever.

- This American Female discovered that people of her kind are not so welcomed and respected in foreign countries as they were, say, well let’s just pick a number, five years ago during that post-college Eurail adventure.

- The massacre of hundreds of Russian school children by Chechen rebels provided a new extreme for how low terrorists will stoop for their causes.

- The New York Times started writing a feature a week on blogs.

- Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America is becoming the first literary novel in quite a while that the masses of people are actually reading.

- The situation in Iraq went from bad to worse.  Abu Ghraib, beheadings, etc. etc.: And yet, a lot of folks seem to buy the presidential line that things there are going well.

- Ma Bell announced that it will no longer seek customers for its traditional land line long distance service. This symbolically signals the end of the telephone as we used to know it.

- People have slowly begun to become aware that there is a genocide under way in northern Sudan.

- The publicity surrounding Bill Clinton’s memoir is almost as big as the book itself.

Anything we forgot?  Let us know at mail @ methree dot net, or by clicking here.

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© 2004 Me Three