Hannukah Favorites
I was clearing out some of the unnecessary seasonal auto-playlists accumulated in Windows Media Player v10, and I thought I'd check out what had been caught by such lists as "Hannukah Favourites". From my collection, that tends to hit a lot of versions of Leonard Cohen's
Hallelujah covered by John Cale, through U2, Jeff Buckley and k.d.lang, or of
Hallelujah I Love Him/Her So covered by Peggy Lee or Ray Charles. More amusing is the
Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel covered by the South Park tots on Mr. Hanky's Christmas Classics. All of these are direct hits, more or less in context, from the keywords specified by the auto-playlist.
What really leapt out at me was Rufus Wainwright's Old Whore's Diet linguistically drift-netted by the keyword/substring "Diet", which also scores a few songs by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in my, now decidedly odd Hannukah mix.
The usual northern-hemisphere assumptions are there for the Christmas auto-playlist, which picks up every piece with "Winter" in the title, not to mention anything from Schubert's Winterreise song-cycle. These are more than compensated for by Mr. Hanky's contributions, Stan Ridgeway's Holiday in Dirt album, every song by Noel Coward, Pinta, Nina, Santa Maria (Into Eternity) from Vangelis' soundtrack to 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and various songs about Santa Fe.
These linguistic errors/assumptions are pretty common in Microsoft products due to inefficient use of internal resources built up over the years in the Natural Language Group, Natural Language Research, Reference products (Expedia etc) . Most of these resources have been allowed to drift away through the company or released since no product group is willing to foot the bill for a cost centre of this type. But that is a story for another day...