Sponsoring Swamplot today: ASCOT — also known as the Alcohol Servers Counsel of Texas. Thanks for the support!

If you work in a restaurant, or in any kind of food-service or food-prep operation, you’re probably already familiar with state requirements for training in food-handling safety. And if you work in a bar or for an alcohol distributor, you probably already know why it’s so important that everyone who has anything to do with selling, dispensing, or delivering any kind of alcoholic beverage complete state-certified training in alcohol safety.

Since 1988, ASCOT has been licensed by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to provide TABC-certified alcohol-server training programs. That makes ASCOT one of the oldest and most established food and beverage certification programs in the country — as well as Texas’s longest-running provider of training in this important field. And ASCOT has been a preferred source for training in food handling in Houston since 2004.

If you’re responsible for making sure new employees are trained promptly and well in these particular areas, you can be sure they’re getting the exact program they need — in the most helpful format possible — by sending them to ASCOT. ASCOT offers its training courses both in a classroom setting and online, in both English and Spanish.

Use the discount code ASCOT on the alcoholservers.com website and the online alcohol-server training course works out to just $9.89 per class. The food-handling class costs just $7.00 — no discount code is needed.

ASCOT’s server-training program is certified by the TABC, and its food-handler program is ANSI Accredited as meeting the ASTM E2659-09 standard. For more details, or to sign up, head over to the ASCOT website — alcoholservers.com — or call 713.922.1223.

Swamplot readers are Houston’s leaders. Reach them by becoming a Sponsor of the Day.

Today our sponsor is Dawn in Damnation, a new paranormal Western novel by Clark Casey. Thanks for supporting Swamplot!

Dawn in Damnation features affordable and creative living spaces . . . in the town of Damnation, on the south side of the afterlife just short of hell. The newly gentrified neighborhood is popular with gun-slinging outlaws from the Old West, as well as werewolves and a lone vampire.

Need a better sense of Damnation? Think True Blood meets a shabby-chic Deadwood. Here’s a review of the book from the Vampires.com website. In Damnation, the local rooming house offers amenities such as cots and the smell of decay, while the saloon functions as a flexible workspace. The best part about Damnation is . . . it hardly every rains.

The novel is available now in paperback and as a Kindle download.

Got some action and adventure for Swamplot readers? Become a Sponsor of the Day.