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UofWinds 389, Week 26 2024: The Waffle House Index, The Confederate Flag of Truce, An Age of Hyperabundance


Good morning. As I write this, there are echos of thunder that I can feel from the chair in my study. There has already been a wave of roof-pounding heavy rain that has passed but now its presence registers more like white noise in the background. I've selected a BBC "Morning After Mix" to add to the soundscape.

This is the first day of a two week vacation for me and so there will be no University of Winds newsletter next week. I know I could have taken this week off for a proper break from routine, but I am always reluctant to take time away from something I love to do.

The Waffle House Index


Last Friday, as soon as my daughter finished writing her second-last grade 10 exam, we drove some nine hours south-east to Chesapeake Bay to attend a family wedding. As my daughter had her last exam on Monday morning, our Sunday was spent making the return trip home. But this time, we were determined to find and try our first Waffle House.

As we waited for the highway exit to take us to brunch, I explained to my family why I was so obsessed with wanting to try this particular restaurant chain. I told them about FEMA's Waffle House Index.

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on.  Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies.  Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. “That’s really bad.  That’s where you go to work.”

Waffle House Inc. has 1,600 restaurants stretching from the mid-Atlantic to Florida and across the Gulf Coast, leaving it particularly vulnerable to hurricanes.  Other businesses, of course, strive to reopen as quickly as possible after disasters.  But the Waffle House, which spends almost nothing on advertising, has built a marketing strategy around the goodwill gained from being open when customers are most desperate...

...Hurricane Irene knocked out power in Weldon, N.C., on Saturday evening, but as the sun rose on this tobacco-farming town at 6:30 the next morning, the local Waffle House, still without electricity, was cooking up scrambled eggs and sausage biscuits.

“I hadn’t had a hot meal in two days, and I knew they’d be open,” said Nicole Gainey, a 22-year-old secretary for a truck-repair company who drove over for breakfast.

When we finally arrived to our first Waffle House experience, it was a late Sunday morning and so we had to wait a short while before seats at the counter were cleared for us. I was delighted because now we had a front row seat and could see how the place operates, because at Waffle House they don't keep the cooking staff in the back of the restaurant. This means that everyone can see how much work goes into making even a simple breakfast meal and how much coordination and hustle it requires to feed a room full of people.

A month or so ago, we tried a Wisconsin-based fast food chain called Culver's, and the experience was a disaster. This particular restaurant was struggling with its electronic ordering system and it took a good twenty minutes to get our custards and even after that time, they got the order wrong. Waffle House, on the other hand, does away with this weak link in their operations entirely. Instead, there is a "secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for food during service."

There's another reason why I'm telling you about Waffle House's disaster response system: global warming now demands that every organization should dedicate resources to prepare and respond to severe weather events. Waffle House demonstrates that we can choose to be more resilient.

Its hurricane playbook explains how to reopen a restaurant and what to serve if there is gas but no electricity, or a generator but no ice.  An important element is limiting the menu so the company’s supply chain can focus on keeping certain items stocked and chilled or frozen...

... The company began tracking Irene 10 days ago, moving ice and eggs to staging sites outside the potential damage zone.

On Friday, the company’s mobile command center—an RV named EM-50 after Bill Murray’s urban-assault vehicle in the 1981 movie “Stripes”—headed north from the Norcross, Ga., headquarters.

Waffle House is our future.

The Confederate Flag of Truce


A couple of weeks ago, two stories were brought to my attention through my social media feeds. The first was a notification of a new podcast that will be coming out in the fall called, Rebel Spirit:

It was during one of those calls that Akilah mentioned an idea she had for a podcast: to change her racist high school team name, The Rebels—named after the confederacy, complete with a confederate general mascot—to a different piece of Southern culture that everyone could be proud of, The Biscuits. I loved the idea so much and we talked about what felt so resonant and right about it and brainstormed about all the different angles you could take and stories you could tell in pursuit of making the change.

If you think it's wild that a high school in Kentucky still has a high school mascot that celebrates the losing side of the American Civil War, just wait until you learn that there's a high school in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (one of the celebrated ends of the Underground Railroad), that also had a confederate general as a mascot... until only two years ago?

Albert Mady was once proud to call himself a Riverside Rebel.

That’s why the longtime Windsor martial arts instructor is disappointed with the recent announcement that Riverside Secondary School is rebranding itself by completely removing all references to “Rebels” — including the name of its sports teams, mascot, and official images.

“When I see this happening, I think it’s ridiculous,” Mady lamented on Tuesday. “I think people are just becoming what I call ‘powder puffs.'”...

... Decades later, Mady still has memorabilia that bears the school’s mascot, “Johnny Rebel” — a cartoon ghost figure wearing the hat of a civil war soldier and carrying a Confederate flag.

But Mady doesn’t associate the symbol with the U.S. South. “It doesn’t mean the same thing. To me, rebels are people who just go for it, work hard, and try to win. That’s what we did… We had really good teams.”

The second story was one that someone kindly amplified and shared as an Instagram reel. That introduced me to the work of artist, Sonya Clark:

Jared Bowen: Unfurled as a monumental sea of off-white filling much of this gallery space is a Confederate Flag of truce, or, as the title of this exhibition explains, the flag we should know.

Sonya Clark: I want everyone to know what this flag is, so we can conceive of what truce really means.

Jared Bowen: History has largely forgotten this simple white flag, actually a towel, used by Confederate troops to signal a truce during General Robert E. Lee's surrender in 1865. The original is now housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. That's where artist and Amherst College professor of art Sonya Clark discovered it during a visit in 2010.

Clark assembled a show called Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, five years ago. In preparing the exhibition space, they decided to add some colour to offset the collection's neutral palette.

Sonya Clark: Because the Confederate flag of truce has these three minimal red stripes on it, I said, well that's the color we will use.

Jared Bowen: The Benjamin Moore sample they inadvertently selected?

Sonya Clark: Was Confederate red. That paint chip color, Confederate red, lived in between two other paint chip colors. One was called raspberry truffle, and the other was called cherry wine. In between these two confections is a color that is about insurrection, about enemies of the states, about people who wanted to keep Black and brown people enslaved.

Don't be a loser like Albert.

Join us for raspberry truffles, biscuits, and cherry wine.

An Age of Hyperabundance


You didn't think you were going to get an issue of the University of Winds without a single mention of AI, did you?

It's not the essay you might be thinking of. You know the one that has been making the rounds this past week. The essay that I'm sharing here isn't it. This one is not angry. It is bittersweet and tired, which is understandable because it takes place at the...

... Chattanooga Convention Center for Project Voice, a major gathering for software developers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs in conversational AI. The conference, now in its eighth year, was run by Bradley Metrock, an uncommonly tall man with rousing frat-boy energy who is, per his professional bio, a “leading thought leader” in voice tech. “I’m a conservative guy!” he said to me on a Zoom call some weeks prior. “I was like, ‘What kind of magazine is this? Seems pretty out there.’”

The magazine in question was this one. Bradley had read my essay “HUMAN_FALLBACK” in n+1’s Winter 2022 issue in which I described my year impersonating a chatbot for a real estate start-up. A lonely year, a depressing charade; it had made an impression on Bradley. He asked if I’d attend Project Voice as the “honorary contrarian speaker,” a title bestowed each year on a public figure, often a journalist, who has expressed objections to conversational AI. As part of my contrarian duties, I was to close out the conference with a thirty-minute speech to an audience of five hundred — a sort of valedictory of grievances, I gathered.

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