Waffle House is prepared to make you breakfast at all hours of the day in any kind of weather. The restaurant chain is so widely respected for its severe weather preparedness that a former director of FEMA started using their stores as an indicator of how bad a particular storm or disaster was:

The “Waffle House Index,” first coined by Federal Emergency Management Agency Director W. Craig Fugate, is based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm and indicates how prepared a business is in case of a natural disaster.

For example, if a Waffle House store is open and offering a full menu, the index is green. If it is open but serving from a limited menu, it’s yellow. When the location has been forced to close, the index is red. Because Waffle House is well prepared for disasters, Kouvelis said, it’s rare for the index to hit red. For example, the Joplin, Mo., Waffle House survived the tornado and remained open.

Annie Blanks recently visited the “Waffle House Storm Center” in advance of Hurricane Dorian’s predicted landfall in Florida.

When any of the stores are in danger of being hit by severe weather, so-called “jump teams” are activated to be ready to deploy wherever needed.

Jump teams are made up of Waffle House contractors, construction workers, gas line experts, restaurant operators, food providers and other associates who are assembled and ready to go wherever needed at a moment’s notice. Their purpose is to help relieve local Waffle House operators and employees who need to evacuate, be with their families or tend to their homes when a storm hits, and help make sure restaurants are able to open quickly after a storm or stay open during a storm.

On Twitter, Blanks shared a photo of the four different pared-down menus that Waffle House prepares for disasters.

(via @LauraVW)

Tags: Annie Blanks   business   food   restaurants   Waffle House

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Source: How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?

Oh boy, here we go. Archie McPhee has just announced their 2019 candy cane flavors. The star of this year’s line-up are the ham-flavored ones, which are aptly called Hamdy Canes.

When the holidays come around, that can only mean one thing: ham! As much ham as you can eat! We think ham flavor is going to be the pumpkin spice of Christmas. Eventually, you’ll be able to get a ham latté. To get the ball rolling, we’ve created Hamdy Canes! You’ll get six ham-flavored candy canes in a box illustrated with a personified ham with a cane. It will cure what ails you. We could make all kinds of hammy jokes, but we’ll stick with the meat of the product. Each candy cane is 5-1/4″ tall with pink and white stripes.

Right now you can get a box of six of them for $6, you sicko.

While you’re there, pick up boxes of the runners-up too: Kale Candy Canes and Pizza Candy Canes. (I know what I’m secretly gifting in this year’s Yankee Swap!)

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Source: Hamdy Canes, ham-flavored candy canes for the holidays

In Whisky tasting using a bimetallic nanoplasmonic tongue (Nanoscale/Royal Society of Chemistry), a team from U Glasgow’s School of Engineering describe their work on an “artificial tongue” lined with “tastebuds” that sense “plasmonic resonance” (the absorption of light by liquids) to produced highly detailed accounts of the profiles of Scotch whiskys, which can be used to determine whether a given whisky is counterfeit.

The team claims more than 99% sensing and identification accuracy.

We have presented a reusable bimetallic nanoplasmonic tongue that displays two distinct resonance peaks per region and whose orthogonal surface chemistries can be selectively modified to tune their ‘tasting’ sensitivity. These unique features have allowed us to halve both the sensor size and necessary data-acquisition time while still providing dataset clustering upon PCA and successful classification with LDA. This is a versatile system, allowing the development of high quality nanoplasmonic tongues for any given application via simple alterations to the chosen surface ligands and/or plasmonic metals in order to produce new sensors with unique chemical responses. This new approach to artificial tongue design may spur the development of portable devices for applications in a point of care diagnostics, counterfeit detection in high-value drinks, environmental monitoring, and defense.

Whisky tasting using a bimetallic nanoplasmonic tongue [Gerard Macias, Justin R. Sperling, William J. Peveler, Glenn A. Burley, Steven L. Neale and Alasdair W. Clark/Nanoscale]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

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Source: Artificial tongue’s nanoscale “tastebuds” can sort real whisky from counterfeits more than 99% of the time