Waffle House and Hurricanes

My youngest daughter and I had breakfast this morning at our local Waffle House. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to spend a little time with our amazing 16-year-old. To do so while sitting in a brightly-lit, cheerful place and being served good, hot coffee, eggs just the way I like them, and buttery toast? Well, that was just gravy! (Ooh, maybe I should've had the biscuits and gravy...)

Anyway, the location got me thinking about something I'd seen in the news when hurricane Sandy came ashore. Did you know that disaster relief organizations, including FEMA, make use of what is called the "Waffle House Index"? It's true:

FEMA Director Craig Fugate has joked that he watches a “Waffle House Index” to determine the severity of a disaster by the state of a Waffle House in a community. By seeing how much of its menu Waffle House is serving, he says he can tell just how bad it’s been with these three zones:

GREEN: Open and serving a full menu
YELLOW: Open but serving from a limited menu
RED: Location is forced to close

Furgate believes in it so much so that he owns a Team Waffle House Shirt.

But what started as a joke, has become something so much more.

Waffle House franchises are located in many disaster-prone areas (mostly coastal hurricane zones in the Eastern U.S.) and the company has developed strategies for staying open and helping out during severe weather events and other catastrophes. It's also interesting how they've begun making use of Twitter to communicate conditions, not just so people know where they can get a meal, but as an indicator for relief administrators who need to set priorities. Interesting stuff!

Unexpected Endings

Sometimes, things don't turn out the way you expect them to. In the 1994 Texas high school football playoffs, John Tyler led Plano East 41-17 with three minutes to play. To say the game had a surprise ending is an understatement. Take a look:



(Also, the announcers in this clip are quite entertaining.)

TIM KELLER PUTS THE RECENT ELECTION IN PERSPECTIVE: "The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in U.S. politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion." Read the whole thing. (This is also a test of "microblogging" form. I may do this kind of short, linky post from time to time.)

Sphere Itself?

Yeah, I know. The name of this blog is maybe too clever by half.

"Sphere Itself" traces back to the word "blogosphere," which was coined by someone back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I think, as blogs began to compete in small ways with larger news-gathering organizations. I view this competition as a good thing—accountability, puncturing the self-regard of institutional journalists and all that—and it wasn't long before my imagination had merged the potential fears of media heavyweights with the most quotable line from FDR's first inaugural speech: "...the only thing we have to fear is 'sphere itself!"

The idea that this humble blog could be feared by anyone—much less anyone with real media power—might well serve as the defining example of "tongue in cheek." But here we are.

Or, at least, here I am—and with much more modest ambitions. Rather than attempt to bring you, dear reader, anything that approximates a distillation of the wider blogosphere, I present here the contents of a different sphere: My own observations and perhaps links to those of others within my circle of family, friends, and acquaintances.

Thanks for visiting!

Just a test post

This is really just a test post, so I can get my blog settings right. Maybe while I'm choosing colors and typefaces for the various elements of this new blog I'll think of something more interesting to say than this. One can hope!