Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse.

As LAist melts away in their heat wave and weird weather, they beg Hollywood to make a bio-pic of the posthumous tap dancer extraordinaries, the Nichols Brothers (you must see this), but for them not to film the movie, or anything for that matter, on their hard-to-find street without proper notification. In one of LA's more trendy neighborhoods, they caught up with a famous homeless person, the Silver Lake Five Dollar Guy, and found the Elliott Smith tribute wall (where he once posed for an album cover) to be defaced by graffiti.

This week was surprisingly busy for the end of August for DCist, what with two major White House resignations and the national obsession over what's really going on in public restrooms. But they still made time to put together a glossary of wine terms and a list of jokes about some local firefighters who are suspected of running a prostitution ring. They never knew "firehose" was actually spelled differently, for example.

Despite their need this week to do some good old-fashioned hating, Phillyist was in good spirits this week, with the Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe festivals kicking off, cheap lobster, and a few helpful readers helping to solve a mystery. They also got some awesome eclipse shots, spread some local TV gossip, and got a few chuckles.

This week, Torontoist found one of the cutest signs ever, reinvented its city's transit survey, investigated how "real" its city's violence is. They were plenty curious to end the summer, too: they tried to uncover a history mystery, tried to pin down its city's fascination with facades, and tried to figure out what was so bad about carpooling.

The UK doesn't have Monday as a Labor Day, but Londonist don't mind. They did their partying last week at the world's second largest carnival. The good vibes continued as they witnessed the unveiling of a statue to Nelson Mandela. They also said happy birthday to Londoner Winnie Langley, who just turned 100 despite having smoked five cigarettes a day since she was a child. They resisted buying her a £25,000 hearing aid, and a very, very expensive skull.