Morning Notes

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by ARLnow.com April 26, 2011 at 8:37 am 2,835 28 Comments

The Salsa Room Starts Serving Mexican Cuisine — Best known as a dance club, The Salsa Room (2619 Columbia Pike) has relaunched with a new food menu. Gone is the Bolivian food from the location’s days as Cecilia’s Restaurant. In its place are Mexican dishes like fajitas, chimichangas and fish tacos. A Sunday brunch menu will launch on June 5. Yesterday the restaurant offered a 50 percent off Groupon (the deal has since ended).

New Library Hours — Starting July 1, the library will expand the hours at certain branches on certain days. Among the branches with new hours: Columbia Pike, Shirlington, Westover, Aurora Hills, Cherrydale, and Glencarlyn. Central Library hours will not change. [Library Hours]

Samuel Beckett’s Sign Requests Denied — Mark Kirwan, owner of Samuel Beckett’s Irish Gastro Pub in Shirlington, is an outspoken critic of the county regulations, and it’s no wonder why. Kirwan has spent thousands on signs and county fees, only to have many of his sign requests denied. Among the rejections: branded table umbrellas, Celtic window graphics and a menu near the door. [Washington Examiner]

Stats on Juvenile Offenders in Arlington — Among the statistics revealed about juvenile justice in Arlington: one quarter of all juveniles placed in probation in Arlington is a student at Washington-Lee High School. [Connection Newspapers]

G Clifford Prout

WTF. Menu near door. I thought that was a given. Even now I’m starting to doubt my county leaders.
- bennynojets
  
  Menus by the door are extremely helpful.
- ArlForester
  
  This was what I came to comment on. I honestly think the county rejects things at times in order to control them. Celtic symbols on the windows? Who cares? Oh yeah, the People’s Republic does.
TGEoA

Article should read “library hours partially restored”
charlie

So once again, a business makes a multi-million dollar commitment to lease space, construct space, hire staff, put together a menu and then they complain because they did NOT KNOW what the County regulations are for signage. Seriously?
look around. Shirlington has very muted and boring signage. There is a reason for that. It is Arlington policy guided by the Fairlington Civic Association that Federal Realty has agreed to. Period.
Next.
- Maria
  
  Thank you. This makes me absolutely crazy. Maybe the ordinances need to be changed (or not, whatever), but why wouldn’t a business owner look into these things *before* doing them?
Josh S

I wonder when Cecilia’s, I mean the Salsa Room, will get the facelift it so sorely needs. The place just looks tired.

On the other hand, I’ve been inside and it’s a nice space.

Library hours increase – this was predicted, I think, when the cuts were made in the first place. So maybe the complainers should just have some patience sometimes.

No menu near door? Weird. Dumb.
charlie

I also think it would be nice if Becketts would focus on their business model. I’ve tried to go there several times. Both times walking by the windows from the parking garage, I see empty seats, and think, oh boy, I can eat there tonight. Both times I’m told that there are 45 minute waits. If you have empty tables and a 45 minute wait, something is wrong. Plenty of other choices so I move on.
- dynaroo
  
  Do they take reservations? That could explain a wait with empty seats – and also provide you with a solution to your problem.
  - charlie
    
    true. few restaurants in Arlington are worthy of a reservation. i had dinner somewhere else, came back 90 minutes later, still empty tables, still a wait. pre-theater dining needs to be expedient.
    - dynaroo
      
      So…YOU could make a reservation. You seem eager to go there, just do what’s required to get a table with no wait.
Mickey

I have ridden the Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, and NY subways for years and years, and NEVER was an escalator, elevator, or train out of service. This is during 20-50 years of riding!!! The DC Metro system is broken, insufficient for the ridership, and should be totally redone. FIRE EVERYONE and start over. Schedule a 6 month maintenance program and replace everything possible with new equipment, train good workers that can maintain the equipment, and revamp the salaries of workers to include benefits. The DC Metro is an absolute disgrace to DC, but to the world. We should be ashamed enough at this point to do something about it.
- david
  
  How do you propose paying for all the replacement trains, track maintenance, new employees, etc?
- dynaroo
  
  Yeah, fire everyone so that a new group of people can fail miserably due to a lack of money.
- Josh S
  
  Selective memory.
- Thes
  
  During that “6-month” period, I wonder how I and 700,000 other people would get to work…
- Captain Obvious
  
  I lived in New York for a while. The tracks were constantly under construction. Some days, no trains would be running on a particular track at all, but there was no way of knowing that, just as there was no way of knowing when the next train might come, so you’d just stand there forever waiting for a train, never sure when you should give up and get a cab. The Metro is clean, air conditioned, has seats, has accurate train arrival times, including on their mobile site. The problem is that the localities it serves have refused to fund it. Why are people angry at Metro rather than at, say, Maryland, which refused to pay its share of the funding for the past two years?
LyonSteve

I don’t use the library much, but the one or two times I recently wanted to check it out on a Sunday I was shocked to find out that its open for 8 hours — but doesn’t open until 1pm!
- Josh S
  
  That’s actually not unusual for Sunday library hours. I’ve seen it other places around the country. I guess there is not typically a lot of demand for the library on Sunday mornings….
Joe

Be sure you pay your meals taxes, Kerwin. Oh, and perhaps you want to get your sign vetted BEFORE you spend $15k to print them up. Just a thought.
- Eponymous Coward
  
  I had the same thought. On the one hand, I feel this guy’s pain. If Arlington wants to regulate signage like this, they need static, unambiguous ADA-like specifications and regulations that any competent person can understand.
  
  On the other hand, who springs $18K on signage and other paraphernalia before seeking approval? According to the parent article, this was not a one-time incident, because he has tried “repeatedly.” So what was he thinking the second time he paid for signage without county pre-approval?
  - Captain Obvious
    
    +1 as to the second paragraph.
CW

I saw some San Pellegrino branded umbrellas at Northside Social last week and was surprised. Think they got approval or are just flouting the rule (or ignorant of it)?
4Arl

TGEoA, none of the hours chosen were part of the original schedule posted as of FY09, hence restored is not really accurate. Does anyone know if the board did this for a reason? More hours are a plus, but I thought opening some hours on the weekday where the library is now closed would have been a priority.
- South Arlington
  
  How did you get an Admin icon? I figured Scott/Arlnow would be the only Admin.
  - ARLnow.com
    
    The admin icon appeared because there was a glitch and we had to insert the comment manually.
Burger

The WL ratio isn’t really that instructive. You need to look at incidents and divide that by number of students in each school to account for population differences in the school.

Taking 2011 March Enrollment for base point and dividing out the number of incidents gets

Langston has a rate of .065
WL at a .028 rate
Wakefield comes in at .023
Yorktown is at .008 and
HB Woodlawn is .007
- dynaroo
  
  Nicely done.

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