Potential D.C. Jail inmates may want to consider some scheduling pointers: First and foremost, don’t get cuffed on a weekend if you want to see your family before Monday at noon.

Saturday visiting hours have been canceled since August, and Department of Corrections Director Devon Brown confirmed to the D.C. Council last week that the policy is permanent. There’ve long been no Sunday visits—leaving friends and family to follow the alphabet rule: Inmates with last names starting with A through H on Tuesday and Thursday, J through P on Wednesday and Friday, Q through Z on Monday.

Plenty of folks are still complaining, though. Inmate advocate Pauline Sullivan, of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, brought her concerns about visitation rules to the oversight hearing for the Department of Corrections last Thursday. “I was very disappointed,” she told public-safety committee chair Phil Mendelson. “I really do not know the reason why it’s been discontinued.”

The cutback, Brown said, was necessary to maintain “safety, security, and order,” and he added that the jail was harder to staff on weekends.

Mendelson was not pleased. “Long-term, it does not sound agreeable,” he said.

Brown replied, “It’s gonna get worse.” An upcoming construction project at the jail, he said, will further curtail visitation rights.

More trouble with ACS: This time, the company’s rival—American Traffic Solutions, which is taking over traffic camera duties from ACS—spotted major troubles with ACS’ speed cameras.

Yesterday, the Washington Post broke printed* the story that a lot of District drivers have been slowing down for nothing: more than two dozen of speed cameras are busted and inoperable. But the piece failed to go into very much detail. More can be found in a March 12 letter from At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson to acting Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

Mendelson writes that, according to the company that services the cameras, “two of the 10 stationary radar units have been out of certification for over eight months…..at least 11 sites have been out of service for at least six months; and one of the cameras (purchased by the District) has an asset tag indicating ‘Property of Fairfax.’”

Mendelson’s wrath stems from a memo he received on March 11 from ATS. That memo goes on to report that 27 out of 50 cameras are inoperable, “cameras reported as operational are simply missing,” and a “number of camera sites have been stripped of equipment and exposed live electrical wires were left at the site.” And the memo snitches on ACS big time:

“Upon move out from the V Street facility, ACS physically severed all of the network cabling within the District’s facility….This resulted in the need for a complete rewiring of the facility and thousands of dollars of additional cost to the District.”

At least they didn’t do this.

ATS eventually had to call the police, the memo states: “ACS made repeated attempts to repossess District owned equipment during hand over to ATS. District police had to threaten to arrest ACS staff on several occasions to stop these attempts.”

Maybe the theft attempt was caught on one of the new crime cameras?

CORRECTION, 3/14: The Post actually didn’t break the story; WTOP’s Mark Segraves tells us he had the scoop the day before. Apologies to Mark. —Ed.

With his Meal Education and Labeling Act of 2007, Phil Mendelson has positioned himself as the District’s culinary Ralph Nader, protecting consumers from greasy, salty, carb-heavy foods that will certainly doom us all in the end.

But as University of Southern* California professor of sociology Barry Glassner writes in his latest book, The Gospel of Food, no one knows for certain what causes us to get fat or whether even our porkiness will shave years off our lives. Food, Glassner notes, is an easy scapegoat, thanks to countless scientific studies that routinely contradict each other from one year to the next.

Glassner reviewed the vast amount of published literature on what causes obesity—and the consequences that obesity can have on health—and walked away with this conclusion:

It’s hard to deny the wisdom of relying upon nutritional scientists for some kinds of dietary guidance. If you don’t want scurvy, you’d better consume some vitamin C. If you’re planning to become pregnant, you need enough folic acid to protect your child against neural tube defects. If you’re suffering from iron-deficiency anemia, you are well advised to eat raisins, beans, liver, eggs, and other foods high in iron.

But deficiency disorders are very different from obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases that Walter Willet [author and professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health] and friends say we can thwart by eating their favored foods. Chronic diseases are caused, as we have seen, not by a missing nutrient, but by a complex interplay of genetics, stress, physical inactivity, and a host of other factors. Undoubtedly, diet plays a role, but science is ill-equipped to tell us how much of a role or which ballyhooed foods are ultimately the most healthful.

Stress over your food choices and food suppliers, in fact, can be one more factor that leads to obesity. Maybe we Americans should just learn to do what the French do: enjoy their food, no matter what’s in it.

About four years back, At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson had a bright idea, one that would put D.C. at the vanguard of the healthy-eating movement: Force certain D.C. restaurateurs to provide nutritional information about calories, fat, carbohydrates, and sodium along with their dishes. Well, the Nutritional Information at Restaurants Act of 2003 didn’t go anywhere, but now—with a new cast of characters on the Council dais—Mendelson’s giving it another shot, this time with a catchy acronym.

Like the original bill, the Menu Education and Labeling (MEAL) Act of 2007 restricts its scope to chain eateries with 10 or more locations nationwide. According to a list distributed with Mendelson’s press release, the new requirements would affect 37 of the 78 chains of that size operating within the District (the rest already offer nutrition facts on the Internet) including 7-Eleven, Buca di Beppo, and Legal Sea Foods. One thing’s for sure: Phil’s no longer a pioneer—New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has stolen his thunder in intervening years.

Mendelson’s not alone on this one: Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry is cosponsoring—always a guy very keen to know what he’s ingesting.

What say you folks: reasonable requirement or nanny state run amok?

The battle over an obscure nomination by Mayor Adrian Fenty to the D.C. Zoning Commission has turned into a public soap opera.

Today, the council is debating the nomination of Geoffrey Griffis to the board. “Debating” would be the nice way of saying “dragging Griffis through the mud.”

Opponents of Griffis’ appointment just can’t forgive and forget his behavior when he was chair of the Board of Zoning Adjustment. In 2004, the National Child Research Center (NCRC) had put in for a zoning change so it could expand its facility in Northwest. As the matter was being debated, opponents of the project learned that Griffis had a personal relationship with Claire Bloch, a former member of the center’s board. He voted in favor of the zoning adjustment, and the NIMBYs hired a private detective to document his late-night rendezvous with Bloch.

All of this was recounted in writing recently when At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson called on Fenty to pull Griffis’ nomination last month. Mendelson promised a “messy” confirmation hearing—and he’s delivered. Most of the mud-slinging and salacious details have been supplied by activists who signed up to testify against Griffis. A block of Griffis supporters is lined up as well.

If that’s not enough intrigue for D.C. Cable Channel 13 viewers, consider this: Bloch was a top campaign worker for Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh’s 2006 campaign. Cheh hasn’t forgotten. She’s been acting like Griffis’ defense attorney from the dais. Campaign finance records show Bloch was paid $5,890 by the campaign. After winning the Ward 3 seat, Cheh pushed to have Bloch elected president of the Ward 3 Democrats. Bloch lost in a close election.

Those who missed today’s council hearing will get a chance to see a rerun of the steamy proceedings when the council votes on the Griffis nomination in a couple of weeks.

Dupont Circle public-safety activist Rob Halligan has had his share of run-ins with Nathan Johnson, an inveterate thief who’s pilfered clothes, food, and trinkets from many an automobile in Northwest over the past five years. So when Halligan spotted Johnson yet again in the company of police officers this past fall, after the 46-year-old was nabbed for allegedly breaking into someone else’s car, Halligan started casually kicking around the idea of pushing for a “Nathan Johnson Law” that would be designed to punish the worst of the city’s recidivists (”Nerves of Steel,” 11/24/06). Although most eponymous statutes serve to memorialize rather than shame their honorees (think: Megan’s Law), Halligan’s talk wasn’t hyperbole. On Dec. 11, he visited the John A. Wilson Building to grab the ears of various D.C. councilmembers, among them Phil Mendelson, chair of the judiciary committee, to discuss the possibility of what Halligan describes as a “three strikes, you’re out or 10 strikes, you’re out” kind of criminal-justice bill. During their 15-minute chat, says Halligan, Mendelson agreed to investigate whether a “Nathan Johnson Law” would be necessary and feasible. “I would be willing to look at legislative proposals,” says the councilmember. As for the statute name, Halligan says he likes the working title but isn’t wedded to it. “That would be fine, but I really don’t care,” he says. “I think it rings nicely, but we can call it the Mendelson Law if that will get it passed.”

From a flier seen on Adams Morgan bus stops late last week:

The fliers were made by Kathryn Harris, a North Cleveland Park resident who put them up after losing her purse in Adams Morgan. Though the bag contained two other valuable items—her wallet and a novel in progress, saved to a flash drive—she chose to focus on the pictures. Turns out the pictures don’t capture the at-large councilmember in flagrante delicto or anything so interesting—they were snapshots of Mendelson taken at a ceremony to honor volunteers.

And, Harris says, “I had a picture of Adrian Fenty. It was real nice.”

So why are the pics so “valuable”? When the bag turned up missing, police advised her to mention anything that had value when asking for a reward; that’s why the phrase “valuable photos” appears.

“I really felt that I got to know him better,” Harris says. “I lost so much. I feel like I lost my relative or something.”

The Washington Post has ramped up the stakes in the hotly-contested at-large D.C. Council race: Judging from the reporter assigned to the contest, the loser among the two main contestants might be written off as politically dead.

The pre-election profile of the Democratic primary contest between attorney A. Scott Bolden and incumbent Phil Mendelson is being penned by Joe Holley, a Metro reporter currently assigned to Post’s obituaries desk.

“I’ve been helping him write it for the last 21 months,” Bolden jokes, about what Bolden sees as a Mendelson political obit. “I ought to done by 10 p.m. Sept. 12.”

Even though vanquished long-term incumbents are most often chalked up as dead if defeated by an upstart, Mendelson thinks Bolden has overlooked a few details.

“He left me to interview Scott,” Mendelson says of Holley. “That would suggest we are both dead.”

Last Friday, the University of the District of Columbia’s law school held its annual fundraising auction. The items up for bids ranged from the pedestrian—four Capitals tickets, breakfast for two at the Tabard Inn—to the not-so-pedestrian—lunch with Councilmember Phil Mendelson, a tour of Ward 8 led by Philip Pannell, and a citywide gay-bar crawl, also with Pannell.

But the offbeat prizes weren’t exactly a cash cow: Pannell, executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Council and a former mayoral special assistant for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender affairs, was bummed at the paltry sums his prizes garnered—the Ward 8 tour earned $55 for the school, the club romp $60. “It obviously shows I’m a cheap date,” says Pannell. “I would probably spend as much on gas as the person spent on the tour.”

But no need for Pannell to get too down on himself: The Mendelson lunch netted only $50. Says Pannell: “I beat Phil Mendelson. That’s a good thing, I guess.”