An only moderately seasonal entry

A while ago I was attending to some errand on the sales floor of the store in whose bowels (until the start of next term) I work, and they were playing a version of "Santa Baby" sung by a man. I listened with a certain amount of curiosity, but was disappointed to hear that he was singing, "Think of all the girls that I could've kissed." Why do people covering songs across genders think that this sort of alteration is a good idea? This is a song about using one's feminine wiles to titillate Santa Claus into giving more presents, and the listener is presumably aware of that by the time they hear this rendition; if you're singing it in a male voice, then, you're already pretty in tension with our unconscious gender expectations. Why not just embrace that tension?

New paragraph, new topic. Do you remember the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space"? It concluded with the suggestion that, regardless of whether there were aliens visiting, we are each of us alone in the universe. That's not among the science fiction touchstones that John Hodgman, er, touches upon here, but he nonetheless produces something that reminds me strongly of it tonally while functioning as an elegant rebuttal -- an argument that, regardless, we are not.

Wednesday dumped several feet of snow on the gradually-less-incredulous city. Then, yesterday, suddenly, it was above zero again. It's been raining on and off since, and the snowbanks are slowly sloughing apart, though they remain still mostly intact, like in the morning when you know you've been dreaming, but the ludicrous events you remember still feel like something that could reasonably happen in the real world.