An uneventful Christmas season passed quietly, as New Yorkers and tourists alike moved to and fro without incident . . . what’s that? Oh, right! A system-wide transit strike, coinciding appropriately with the darkest day of the year, produced massive inconvenience, economic losses, and countless media tales of New Yorkers’ resilience. The last of these prompted a backlash; one pundit observed that residents of Santa Fe probably could have handled walking to work (an assertion that remains unproved). Jeanine Pirro took transit-strike lemons and made media-savvy lemonade, slipping her Senate-race withdrawal under the front-page radar. Peter Braunstein was hauled up from Memphis for his arraignment, sporting a growth of characteristically fiendlike stubble. More benign facial hair arrived in town on new Yankee Johnny Damon, who proved that the siren song of a haircut-and-beard-trim Post photo op (plus $52 million) can sway even the most unkempt of Red Sox. The NYPD executed a supercool crowded-street-in-broad-daylight sting on behalf of Jennifer Lopez, arresting two hustlers who thought they were meeting a bagman to trade a stolen video of her wedding for $150,000—which, in the case’s only detail not dripping with hard-boiled awesomeness, was to be paid by check, rather than in crisp hundreds. Sean Lennon announced his search for a new girlfriend in the Post, urging the interested to contact “Page Six,” a questionable place to incubate a relationship. In a terrible week for the stock market, Carson Daly stopped by to ring the closing bell. (The Dow itself was stable.) And finally, admirers of old-fashioned hard work everywhere were saddened as longtime Jet receiver Wayne Chrebet—an underdog who hustled his way to a long career—announced his retirement; he’d suffered his ninth concussion in a November game. Even while taking the career-ending blow, Chrebet made the catch and held on to the ball for a first down. Of course, no less was expected from him. He wasn’t playing for the Santa Fe Jets.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Ben Mathis-Lilley
• Table of Contents: Jan 9, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!