Who Had the Worse Week?

• The El Paso County Sheriff’s office violated the gentleman’s agreement that you don’t overtly politicize Santa Clause when it tweeted a photo of St. Nick applying for a concealed carry permit. The Second Amendment crowd has defended the tweet, but we’ll see how they feel when someone like NARAL tweets a photo of Santa taking his granddaughter to get an abortion. Speaking for most of us, keep Santa out of your culture wars.
• Better.com CEO Vishal Garg learned the hard way what a backlash to stupidity feels like when he fired 900 employees over a mass Zoom call. In the three-minute video meeting, Garg told employees, “If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off.” He later explained that the employees were “stealing” from their colleagues and customers by being unproductive.
• Singer Billie Eilish may have 97 million followers on Instagram, but her recent “can’t-miss” book has sold only 64,000 copies in seven months. At least Eilish was on the receiving end of the advance. The publisher, Grand Central Publishing, invested well over $1 million in the project.
• Hundreds of protesters demonstrated against Boise State University professor Scott Yenor after he made misogynistic comments about women in the workplace at the recent National Conservatism Conference. In what I can only imagine was a cadence similar to that of Andrew “Dice” Clay, Yenor said, “Every effort made must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.”
• In what researcher’s say is a sign of the hidden toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, “American adults’ blood pressure rose markedly in 2020 compared with the year before.” The largest increases were found in women.
• Pro tip: When you have just killed someone, even inadvertently, listen to your lawyers and try to keep a low profile. That’s the advice that actor Alec Baldwin ignored when he appeared in a disastrous interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. The public reaction to the interview was so bad that Baldwin deleted his Twitter account.
• Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was convicted of staging a hate crime, and faces the very real possibility of serving jail time.
• Peleton isn’t happy that Mr. Big died of a heart attack while riding the ubiquitous exercise bike in the reboot of “Sex and the City.” The company quickly responded blaming lifestyle factors – specifically “cocktails, cigars and big steaks” – for the fictional character’s death.

So, who won the week?

• It finally snowed in Denver.
• Woodland Park native Nichole “Vapor” Ayers was one of 10 people selected to become a NASA astronaut from a pool of more than 12,000. Ayers graduated from the Air Force Academy and currently flies F-22 Raptor fighter jets for the Air Force.
• Tiger Woods will make his first return to competitive golf next week when he joins his 12-year-old son in the PNC Championship that allows pro golfers to team up with family members. Woods was in a brutal car accident in February that many thought would end his hopes of playing competitively.
• Journalists across the country are cheering the news that Lee Enterprises – publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Buffalo News, among others – rejected an unsolicited offer from vulture capital firm Alden Global Capital. Among the journalists cheering loudest are those at The Denver Post, who have been subjected to Alden’s draconian ownership tactics.