Photo credit: Globe and Mail

The national anthem figured prominently on Google Trends this week thanks to the Harper government’s attempt to slip an edit to O Canada into the speech from the throne. CBC Radio’s Q asked tweeps to comment: @CBCRadioQ “The ‘O Canada’ Debate: Action or Distraction? tell the Q blog: cbc.ca/q #anthem”

Eliza Deary weighed in on the Q blog with this:

“All I really want to know is who actually is offended by ‘in all thy son’s command’? Rather innocuous isn’t it? So many terms have been changed needlessly in my opinion. I’m a woman in the trades and am perfectly happy with the term ‘tradesman.’ It takes nothing away from my femininity or stature as owner of a construction company. Rather it describes what I do. These gender neutral term changes are, I feel, self defeating in the ‘woman’s movement’. I sit firmly in the camp of the Oh Canada lyric change being a distraction from real issues.”

Vancouver’s @matwilcox was a little more to the point: “Leave my anthem alone. I mean it. Go think about something important like the downtown Eastside instead.”

Andrew Coyne (@acoyne), national editor of Maclean’s Magazine, tweeted: “Finally, someone has had the courage to take on the hate-filled screed known as O Canada” quoting Robert Silver’s Globe and Mail piece, “Throwing the anthem under the bus”.

Apparently the Twitterverse is waiting with bated breath for Stephen Colbert’s (@Stephenathome) reaction to anthem-gate.

For 17 all-too-brief days we did stand as one at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Well, almost. There was the uninformed sniping about bilingualism. Then there was the theft of Sidney Crosby’s equipment and gold-winning puck.

But the real kvetching focused on the closing ceremonies. From @EdmontonJournal reporter @dstaples: “In a country full of funny people, they pick unfunny Will Ferguson of unfunny Calgary to write 4 Shatner, O’Hara, Fox. Badly done #van2010”. @stuartma wrote: “I’m watching a replay of the Closing Ceremonies with my kids who didn’t see it & they *still* suck”. @VanCanToonFan summarized the whole thing nicely: “#van2010 Closing Ceremonies: the good (Maple Leaf Forever), the bad (Nickelback) and the ugly (John Furlong’s French)”.

Speaking of national pastimes, Twitter users are in full chirp about the annual Tim Horton’s “Roll up the rim to win” contest. @KFBradley notes: “#rolluptherim Dear Mr Horton, I’m not greedy. I don’t need a RAV4. $10,000 will do. Sincerely, Your loyal customer.”

@KFBRadley should try the iPhone app, RimRoller. Yup, now there’s an app for that! Available on the iTunes store, it tracks your “please play agains” versus your donut wins, then works out and tweets your ratio. If only the tweets had your GPS coordinates so we could do a mashup of the winning stores on Google maps!

I really need to get out more.

What won’t be in the iTunes store are so-called Wifi stumbler apps, the little iPhone apps that help you find free wireless networks. From @mashable “We wrote repeatedly about Apple’s odd and often unfair application approval process. Instead of fixing it, Apple is just getting weirder and weirder about what apps are allowed in the store. The latest example is the sudden disappearance of several Wi-Fi stumbler applications from the app store.”

Here’s my conspiracy theory – this is timed to precede the launch of the iPad and aimed to appease mobile carriers who wish to drive 3G revenue. Grassy knoll that for a while!

As usual, send me your feedback on Twitter at @dblacombe or via e-mail doug@communicatto.com.

Doug Lacombe is president of communicatto.com, a digital marketing, investor and public relations agency.

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