Try these Friday night flicks: Bev Oda Movies

If you're at all into Twitter culture, one of things you may have seen pop up from time to time is what I'll call Hashtag Games. (If there is an actual word or phrase for these, I'd love to know about it.).  These games can be kind of fun.

The premise is simple: Someone declares a hashtag, then followers have to try to figure out the joke, and once you get the joke, you're free kick in the creativity.

One going around yesterday, for example, was #okaysuperpowers . So the idea here is to tweet out some humdrum “super powers”. Comedians and collaborators Michael McKean and Harry Shearer had fun with this. @MJMcKean tweeted out: “Can defry refried beans #okaysuperpowers” while @TheHarryShearer topped the charts with : “#okaysuperpowers Can force all the world's socks to remain in matching pairs thru end of fiscal year.”

So that was fun.

But for Canadian political junkies — who have been following the sturm und drang that is the Bev Oda Affair, a Hashtag Game popped up last night that almost instantly became one of the top 'trending” items on Twitter. It was #BevOdaMovies.

Oda, of course, has been under fire from her political opponents and editorialists around the country to quit or resign after she was caught telling Parliament one thing in December and another thing now. Most call that lying. (The Conservatives say she did no such thing.) The central document in this case is a memo from her bureaucrats in which the bureaucrats recommend her to grant funding to a non-governmental aid agency called Kairos and someone has written in, by hand, the word “not” to reverse the bureaucrats recommendation. Everyone concedes that Oda was perfectly within her rights to reverse the bureaucrat's decision. Her problem is she once said she had no idea who put the “not” into the memo; then she later said she was responsible for those three letters.

So with that belaboured set-up, the idea behind #BevOdaMovies is to tweet out real or fictional titles of movies in which this political drama is played out.

My contributions: Unforgiven, The Blind Side, Not The Greatest Show on Earth

Here though are my favourites in this category:

• HeatherInOttawa Heather D

  The Lyin' in Winter. #BevOdaMovies
• rodmickleburgh Rod Mickleburgh

  Much Oda About Not Thing #bevodamovies
• B_Grade Bryan Eaton

  Some Like it Not #BevOdaMovies