600 Block 7th Street, NW.  © 2011 Matt Dunn

Dominican eatery and bar Carolina Palace, on 14th Street NW, might say the same thing, if Metropolitan Police Department allegations can be believed. The nightlife spot, which sometimes blasts salsa and reggaeton from its dark interior, has had multiple incidents of violence, most recently a stabbing. Desire might be a factor.

At an Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration hearing today, MPD officer Eric Garcia-Burgos said the violence wasn't Carolina Palace's fault. "The problem isn't the place itself, it's basically the patrons," said the officer, who sped to the eatery after an April 9 stabbing that occurred around 3:15 a.m. The bloody altercation came after a fight started inside the establishment and migrated outside. The incident prompted ABRA to schedule a fact-finding hearing. When Garcia-Burgos interviewed the victim's friends, they said it all started over a woman. That didn't surprise the cop in the least. "Whatever incident happens [at Carolina Palace]," said Garcia-Burgos, "nine times out of ten it has to do with females."

(Of course, if that's the case, Feminism 101 teaches us that at the core of that awful dynamic is women being treated as objects.)

Owner Esteban Ramirez says there's something besides sexism at work, though. He told the board the area around his restaurant gets crowded because there are four other establishments nearby, and the crowding causes chaos as patrons head home. Of course, that couldn't have contributed to the stabbing he was there to talk about, since the conflict happened inside. But Garcia-Burgos said the area sometimes lacks patrols, because it happens to be on the border of his police district, the 4th, and its neighbor, the 3rd. The 4th has no problem covering its territory, but the area is "real busy" for the 3rd, "so unfortunately they can't always have people out there."

Whatever is to blame, the business won't be punished. The board declined to take further action.

Photo by stevendepolo via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Redskins and Giants: They're looking more and more like NFC East twins. One squad can't move the ball yet shows a little life out there on the field; and hey, so does the other. With the same results: Another loss. On the Giants front, this fourth straight defeat comes just before their bye week. So that means that the team's beat writers—with, of course, nothing more to write about—will spend a week and a half talking about the psychology of going into the bye week with a loss. You know, how it lingers and on and on. Deadly.

Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander hops on one of my pet peeves this week. The topic of his column is the paper's over-reliance on anonymous sourcing. That's a tired story in American journalism, but he's the ombo, so fine. But after you drill into his column a touch, you get to this gripe:

When they must be used, The Post doesn't do a good enough job of explaining why.

The Post's internal policies say: "We must strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence." That means offering enough description so readers can evaluate the quality of the source. Did they actually see or hear what took place? Do they have first-hand knowledge?

A review of anonymous-source usage over the past month shows that readers often got only bare-bones attribution. Of roughly 100 Post news stories using unnamed sources, fully a third provided no meaningful description. Typically, they referred vaguely to "sources," "officials," a "State Department official" or a "Democratic official."

And to all that, I say, hey, who really gives? I mean, readers know that when anonymous sources winds up in the paper, those sources don't want readers—anyone—to figure out who supplied the information. In other words, they want no identifying information in there. Not a trace. Yet people like Alexander, not to mention the Post's internal handbook, insist on as much identifying information as possible.

The result? We get a lot of bullshit qualifiers: "a source close to the negotiations," "a source who has seen the document but didn't want to be identified because he stands to be fired if he is outed." Well, I've never seen that last one, but you get the notion: These attempts to assure the reader that the source is bona fide never amount to anything. It's just wasted characters. The bottom line is this: The information has to be sound, whether it's supported by anonymous sources or not.

A senseless death: Two men rob a liquor store on upper Georgia Avenue, according to an account in the Washington Post: "Based on the account of at least one other employee in the store, investigators believe that two men, one armed with a handgun, entered the business and demanded money from [employee Rufina] Hernandez. Hernandez 'was cooperating and was fully complying with all the demands,' [MPD Sgt. John] Johnson said, but one of the suspects 'shot her anyway.' The two suspects fled on foot, Johnson said."

On Tuesday, Gene Weingarten, perhaps the leading brain at the paper, applauded the anger: "The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story."

As Post staff writer Hank Stuever wrote in his personal blog, the incident "embroiders [Allen's] legend." One commenter on this blog put it this way: "As someone who recently canceled his subscription to the Post after more than 30 years, I wish all the best to Henry Allen. I only wish he had slugged more of those nitwits on his way out."

All this Allen talk is headed in a pretty predictable direction, fitting neatly into a narrative best labeled as demise-of-the-Post nostalgia. The contours are familiar to anyone who's ever had a beer with a beneficiary of one of the paper's newsroom buyouts: Back in the old days, the Post was a real newspaper, a place where real stories were written and real journalists like Allen were free to do their thing. But now the Post is crumbling, its standards falling, a process punctuated by Allen's burst of violent anger.

There's some evidence to support the interpretation. By all indications, Allen isn't pleased with the direction of the Post. He was pissed when the regime of Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli pretty much ended the Style tradition of writing "Appreciations" following the deaths of major cultural figures. He's reportedly not too happy about the new look of the paper, about the smaller number of stories that are featured on the front of the Style section. He can't stand the memos about the new Multi-Platform Editing Desk.

So, yeah, there was a 68-year-old legend patrolling the Style assignment desk nursing some ambient anger about his workplace. That anger, of late, had become a much-commented-upon topic among Style staffers, at least one of whom wondered when the veteran would snap.

He'd yell a lot from his desk, inveighing against this management decree or that debasement of the news product. The words would carry over into the Style landscape and beyond. Recent months have been serendipitous for Allen's open-air broadsides at management: Ever since the main newsroom on the fifth floor of the Post building cleared out for renovations, Brauchli and his fellow honchos have been camping out with the Style people. Administrative assistants for Brauchli and other ranking editors got particularly unfiltered blasts. This multiplatform shit!

Onto this hot, rancorous griddle flopped Roig-Franzia. As I wrote in a previous post, Allen and Roig-Franzia had earlier exchanged words over a piece that the latter was writing about a woman who'd undergone multiple abortions—actually, 15 in 15 years.

Allen wasn't buying it. He asked what sort of proof the writer had that this woman, Irene Vilar, was telling the truth. A prominent law firm had corroborated the story, came the response. Whatever Allen's concerns, the Post reportedly vetted the story extensively.

The tension over the Vilar piece carried over into the "charticle" that Style co-boss Ned Martel had dialed up for the Saturday edition, written by Monica Hesse and Roig-Franzia. It was to be an historical tour through episodes in which sensitive information was unwittingly leaked—a riff off the hot news of the day, which was the wide-ranging congressional ethics investigation that had recently slithered into the public domain.

Allen hated the draft that he'd reviewed, calling it the "second-worst" piece that'd landed on his desk over 43 years. After Roig-Franzia heard that spiel, he called Allen a "cocksucker." Allen responded by popping him.

Freeze the frame right there. Henry Allen punches Manuel Roig-Franzia: Is this moment really laden with symbolism about the demise of the Post, about the decay of long-form narrative journalism, about sticking up for a bygone era?

Who knows what symbolism Allen may have intended to convey here. (He declined an interview about his take on the contemporary Post.) Yet the fight works poorly in the nostalgic slot where many have placed it and slides more neatly into what one staffer called the Woody Hayes mold of a graying icon going out in a fit of rage.

Here's why the old guard v. new guard interpretation falls flat:

*Roig-Franzia makes for an illogical symbol/punching bag for the "new" Washington Post. This guy predates the Brauchli ascension by many years. Nor is he the buzzword-spouting tool that Allen so despises. No, he's a practitioner of long-form journalism, just like anyone who aspires to write for the Style section. And a point about "cocksucker": Use of profanity in Style is the rule, thanks in part to the serial foul mouth of Allen himself. Yet more: The charticle wasn't Roig-Franzia's idea; it was the idea of Martel, who brought a magaziney sensibility to the section.

*There's nothing contemptible about a charticle. Style has long experimented with the breaking of formats and templates and molds—whatever you call them. Executing a charticle often takes way more work than upchucking some lame essay off the news. You gotta get the writers with the art people and the layout people, come up with all kinds of catchy headlines and subheads, and then put it all together. With all that effort, out the window goes the notion that the charticle is some pimpled incarnation of a new, cowardly, corporate Washington Post. Style editors going back many years have always been proud of their charticles. And I happened to have enjoyed this charticle quite a bit.

*Long-form narrative lives on in Style! If you've been monitoring your Style section this week, you may have noticed a two-part series on the youth-heroin ring in Centreville. I'm not saying this is a great model of reportage: After all, it tries to tell the story of kids abusing heroin through interviews with adults. But it is impeccably structured and long—just north of 6,000 words. Roig-Franzia's abortion piece, meanwhile, clocked in at a healthy 2,715 words.

Speaking of compelling narratives, what about Stuever's comparison of the Wawa and Sheetz convenience-store chains? At 2,453 words, the story married killer concept with smooth, highly reported execution. It was printed in late August, nearly a year into the Brauchli tenure. And I guarantee this: Had it been published five or ten years ago, it would have been cited by nostalgists as an exemplar of how great the Post used to be.

*Style is on the upswing. Brauchli has sustained a goodly amount of justified criticism for various instances of silliness and hypocrisy, with the Brauchli Doctrine serving as a premier example of the latter. Yet this executive editor cannot be slimed with neglecting the Style section. On the contrary, he has invested in it, transferring talent from the shuttered Sunday Source and other spots in the newsroom, not to mention bringing in Martel. Dividends have come in the form of improved long-form stuff, attractive layouts, and fewer self-indulgent essays (at least by my count). In recent months, I've found myself squirreling away the section at home in the hope that another individual won't dump it in the recycling bin before I can read all the way through it.

And to continue sucking the cock of the Washington Post, let's not fall into facile banter about its descent into corporate, soulless behavior, as have many Internet commenters. Throughout this decade, the Post's newspaper division has seen nothing short of a revenue crisis. Like other newspapers, it has responded in part by cutting staff. Unlike other newspapers, it has cut staff with a visible reluctance and agony, choosing to leverage its huge pension fund to offer voluntary buyouts to elder Posties. Hundreds of buyoutees have left the paper with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash plus other goodies that no "corporate" newspaper would ever extend.

The Post newsroom has dropped from around 900 employees to around 600-700 employees. It may not be what it was. But what remains is far bigger than what's gone.

Though it's unclear exactly what they were arguing about, it is clear that the mood was testy. Testy enough, that is, for Roig-Franzia to quip to Allen, "Henry, don't be such a cocksucker."

Allen didn't take kindly to the suggestion and went after Roig-Franzia, in the testimony of an eyewitness. Limited combat then broke out, though, again, it's not terribly clear how many punches landed.

The mayhem broke out not far from the temporary office of Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli. A lean man, Brauchli reportedly was among the first Post males on the scene to perform the time-honored "break it up" duties. A few others helped out, too.

We have calls out to both principals and will keep prosecuting the story as the day progresses.

Update 11:28 am: Attempts to get Brauchli on the line regarding his alpha-male heroics have proven futile thus far. The executive editor is apparently on travel today. However, WaPo spokesperson Kris Coratti issued this statement in response to questions about the matter: "I can't discuss private personnel matters but that doesn't mean we haven't taken this incident seriously and addressed it appropriately."

Just what "appropriately" means here isn't quite clear yet. Before taking on that question, we're looking to speak with Allen and Roig-Franzia, not to mention other individuals.

Update 12:25 pm: Reached Roig-Franzia on his cell phone. After I identified myself, his phone hung up.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out City Paper's exclusive reenactment of this historic event: Allen v. Roig-Franzia ~ The Movie!

For those looking for nonaverage activity at the National Zoo today, there is one can't-miss destination: the Great Ape House. First, there's the newest adorable zoo baby, the tiny gorilla born Jan. 11 and recently discovered to be female. (She is yet unnamed while the zoo works up the requisite lather among the faithful, who will get to vote on several choices.) Mandara, the mom, is getting more comfortable showing her progeny off to visitors. She comes up to the glass, the small baby latched on to her prominent nipple.

"Is she nursing?," asks 14-year volunteer Marsha Broadwell. "They like us to mark down when she's suckling."

Soon however, Baby Gorilla Doe is only a sideshow. There's a scream. There is chasing. There is major teeth-baring.

Fight! Fight!

To the untrained eye, the melee is exciting, loud, and totally awesome compared to sleepy red pandas who are supposed to be getting it on. Broadwell, who volunteers at the Great Ape House Wednesday afternoons and Thursday mornings, confirms this. "In my total involvement here, I've probably only seen a real fight maybe three or four times," she says.

And then she bursts the bubble: This was not one of them. "Had these been chimpanzees, you would have seen a little bit of blood by now," she says.

Zookeeper Erin Stromberg is even less impressed. She says the fight—which she downgrades to more of a scuffle—is pretty common. You might say average. Stromberg breaks the action down this way:

Kojo (the 7-year-old male) basically grazes the ankle of 14-year-old Kigali. "She's a screamer," says Stromberg, later adding: "I might characterize her as an insecure female."

Kigali, in keeping with her character, let's out a high-pitched squelch. The scream sets off the other gorillas, including Mandara, with baby attached. "Oh yeah, she was in there," says Stromberg. "I had to check and make sure she didn't lose the baby while it was happening."

But all eyes are on Baraka, the silverback, the patriarch, the heavy. He moves around the perimeter of the scuffle, possibly trying to figure out which little punk got out of line. But he's calmer than some silverbacks and within a matter of a few seconds, he's eating and throwing hay; the rest of the group settles down for a snack as well.

Stromberg sums up the Great Ape House on a typical day: "It's a soap opera around here."

Photo by Mehgan Murphy/Smithonian's National Zoo