Melanie Yugo displays some of her handiwork from a previous Spins & Needles event. Photo courtesy Spins & Needles.

DAYLIGHT RAVINGS
Spins & Needles is a fun idea for a night out. Here’s what happens: A group of crafty kids descend on a bar, club, or gallery to listen to the tunes and create the night’s assigned craft — anything from silkscreened t-shirts to dioramas.

The concept came to Ottawa some six years ago. The instigators were DJ Jason Pelletier — who has an ear for soulful house and funk — and artist Melanie Yugo, the resourceful, Etsy-inspired partner who leads the craft session.

Yugo and Pelletier met more than 10 years ago at a U of O summer French program. They soon found that their mix of crafting and disc jockeying fit well into the club scene and started to develop their events between completing degrees and getting jobs, bringing club kids together to hone their creativity.

The organizers are continuing on that path this week with a daytime event. The latest Spins & Needles incarnation — a celebration of six years funkifying O-town — takes revellers to the Byward Market for Bricolage Brunch, with tunes from Pelletier, Meterman, and DJ Zo, plus DIY design projects served up along with continental breakie. Sunday, April 3. 12 – 4 p.m. includes eats, beats, and art materials. 19+. Honest Lawyer, 141 George St.  www.honestlawyer.com

WHERE ELSE TO BE THIS WEEKEND
Check out the all-vinyl set from Rayaz at the Konkrete Jungle 613 April Fool’s Day Jam. Rayaz, a name in the scene since the days of Atomic nightclub, will spin old-school jungle, ragga, and drum ‘n’ bass at the event, which features fellow DJs Maysr, Bellyful Sound System, and Saxon. Organized by drum ‘n’ bass enthusiasts and DJs Rob Sherwood and Jessica Webster, Konkrete Jungle takes place the first Friday of every month at Ritual Nightclub. Friday, April 1. 10 p.m. . Ritual Nightclub, 137 Besserer St.

Also at Ritual: Take in the cool sounds of Memphis, the side project of Torquil Campbell, co-bandleader of the group Stars. April 6. Ritual Nightclub, 137 Besserer St.

For jazz lovers: Canadian cabaret singer Patricia O’Callaghan has a torchy tone to her voice, sure to dazzle audiences. Friday, April 1 and Saturday, April 2. 7:30 p.m. . NAC Fourth Stage, 53 Elgin St. www.nac-cna.ca/en/fourthstage

Ottawa Magazine

Social media platforms and a company blog are a symbiotic relationship. You could have the best blog in the world, but if you don’t have a large amount of traffic coming to the site, who’s reading it?  Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Linked In allow you to bring your content to your intended audience in a platform they visit more frequently. Similarly, even popular, high traffic sites like consumer goods brands need a platform in their social media world to call home. Social media sites specialize in transient content that is here now, gone tomorrow. Content you create and reference on your blog will forever be available online and referenced as “yours.” For this reason we really consider Blogs to be the cornerstone to any social media presence.

As we discussed in our previous post, content strategies help companies know what type of content should be covered on their blog and social media platforms each quarter. These content strategies acknowledge the content that will be featured on the blog and then consider how the messaging and posts on your social media platforms can support and compliment that. Blogs help you have content to keep your social media fresh and a content strategy is a surefire way to avoid social media writers block!

In terms of actual integration, feeds from your blog can be set up to automatically tease your latest blog entry on your social media pages. Your audience can now comment on your posts in any platform. Historically this has taken away some of the traffic and comments on the actual blog itself however, new tools allow your blog to reflect that activity and show those comments all in one place. We think this is simply the cat’s meow!

We’ve been discussing ways that the Facebook’s Social Plugins can make any website more social. These features apply to your blog as well. The Like Box is a great tool for showing the face of all your fans and followers who are receiving your content feed via Facebook.

In addition, the Recent Activity feed shows the most recent postings on your Facebook wall. This is a great way to support your content, enticing visitors to follow you on Facebook and ultimately follow your blog.

hand illustration credit to Aidan Jones

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Day 4: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie studies ravens, eagles, and crows before discovering a website with reliable election predictions

We really should bring back the old Roman art of soothsaying.

We certainly have enough geese around town to do lots of readings. And there are omens galore: the white-winged raven that lives near my place; the bald eagle that circled Parliament Hill the day before the government fell; the strange and jarring growth in the local crow population in recent times.

I suspect the crows are around because they’re pretty sure they’re safe from predators. They should have been wiped out years ago by hungry pollsters, yet, like political journalists, poll takers have no real shame about being wrong.

Right now, I have only one bet placed on this election. I have 0 out there that says there will not be a Harper majority. I don’t believe that’s a particularly safe bet. Pretty much a coin toss, really, at this stage of the campaign.

There’s still a chance that someone will say something incredibly stupid. Campaign ads can backfire. Harper could be caught swallowing a kitten. Someone could get a picture of the coffin being loaded into the sleeping quarters on the Liberal campaign plane. Jack Layton’s hip-soothing painkillers could inspire him to tell us what he really thinks of ordinary Canadians — folks who, unlike him, don’t have a 0,000-a-year family income.

I don’t trust polls, partly because I’m not the trusting sort, and partly because I read the fine print. Plus or minus 4 percent gives the pollster 8 percent to work with. That’s a huge amount of room: the difference, in many elections, between winning and losing, between majority and minority.

Then there’s the ultra-fine print. The pollsters claim their results are right 19 out of 20 times. So 5 percent of the time, they’re flat-out wrong.

Then there are the other little problems. People hang up on them. They don’t call people’s cell phones. People lie. And the calls don’t seem all that random. I never got a call from a pollster before I moved to Ottawa in the mid-1990s. Now I get called all the time.

Pollsters seem to have no problem accepting my lies that I am a 26-year-old community college dropout with seven kids who lives in the Rockcliffe postal code area and earns more than 0,000 a year. And when I tell them I’m voting Bloc Québécois, they say “uh huh” and write that down, too.

But there is hope for those of us who go to Wikipedia to look up the endings of movies, so we won’t be so surprised when Josh Hartnett gets shot in the belly by stereotypical Japanese soldiers and Ben Affleck ends up raising his kid.

I found one web site that does a riding-by-riding analysis of the campaign and has a pretty good track record of calling federal and provincial elections. The Election Prediction Project tends to be the best around. That’s the good news. They say John Baird does not have a lock on Ottawa West-Nepean. More good news. Otherwise, none of the local incumbents have anything to worry about. That’s bad news.

But it’s soooo Ottawa.

Ottawa Magazine

Bruce Marks brings a hard-to-match combination of balletic star power and arts-administration expertise to the faculty of this year’s DanceLife Teacher Conference, which will bring dance teachers and school owners from across the United States to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona from July 30 through August 2.
Dance Studio Life

To help publishers get better returns from their digital subscription models, Scout Analytics is enhancing its “revenue optimization” platform for paid content, which lets publishers

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Gary Vaynerchuk meets up with the second group, including Smokenmirrors, SS Chris, Kahuna, and Brooklyn Paul. They all picked Napa Cabernets and tasted through these four high end reds. This is the second of four shows.

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Comments on this episode(283) Post a comment ›

• “How boring – all cabs. So now in two shows we have all red wines. Re…” by
• “Really nice job Gary. This is a great thing for your fans! So far I be…” by Stan Reitan
• View all 283 ›

Wines tasted in this episode:

2006 Tamber Bay Cabernet SauvignonNapa Cabernet
2007 Kathryn Hall Cabernet SauvignonNapa Cabernet
2008 Caymus Special Select Cabernet SauvignonNapa Cabernet
2004 Karl Lawrence Reserve MorisoliNapa Red Meritage

Wine Library TV

Ellen Ferreira, president of Costume Gallery, a leading manufacturer of dance recital costumes, will conduct a seminar on “The Studio Owner as CEO” for dance teachers and school owners across the United States at this year’s DanceLife Teacher Conference, held July 30 through August 2 at the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Dance Studio Life

Gary Vaynerchuk continues the week tasting with Coupe 60, Rich S, DRod, and grape_ape, the third part of four shows. This group chose a mixed bag of classic whites and reds from all around the world.

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Comments on this episode(208) Post a comment ›

• “Hooray! Some white wines (FINALLY). Of course, they were all Rieslin…” by
• “Another great show

  qotd1: I have, a couple times
  qotd3: yes, cant rem…” by John__J

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Wines tasted in this episode:

2006 Rudi Pichler Riesling Achleiten Smaragd Austrian Riesling
2008 Donnhoff Niederhauser Hermannshohle Riesling SpatleseNahe Riesling
2007 Ridge Monte BelloSonoma Red Blend
2004 Vega Sicilia Valbuena 5 AnoRibera Del Duero

Wine Library TV