Pete, darling. Most people on the board know where Ft. Worth is. I bet some of the Dallasites don’t know where Bedford is.
And I’m sorry to see that purrp isn’t going to be here 
But I can certainly relate! Give Mr. Bear a hug for me.
Hugs to you, Scotti!
Zy, have you picked out the champagne yet? Mind if I bring a bottle?
Domain St. Michele Cuvee Brut
You can bring champagne if you want, but it sounds like we are going to have soooooo much alcohol.
OTOH, if we don’t open something, it can be drunk later. Better to have too much than too little!
Woohoo! We have 13 not counting the maybes! We’re going to fill up half the restaurant!!!
Well, it now appears that I won’t make it after all. Hopin’ for next time.
Happy Birthday Z
I’m confirming for myself, but Mrs. Chef is working at Little Gym and will be taking Chef Jr. with her - he’d be bored as hell surrounded by nothing but grownups and I’ll have a much better time without having to deal with a bored 8-year-old all night.
See you there!
Er, did anyone call this place and reserve a table that big?
Yes, I did! (He sounded a little surprised)
It was great to meet all you guys. The ride home got a little interesting. Kept seeing lighting in the sky all the way, and still no brakes on the bike. Luckily, I didnt have to stop to many times between arlington and benbrook.
Glad to hear you made it back alright!
Grace, where were you?
I had a great time, as always.
I talked with Grace last night, she wasn’t feeling well and was sorry she couldn’t make it.
I’ll try to post some pictures today.
Oh, and Happy Birthday, Zy.
Jim
It was so nice to meet you all!
here are some thoughts:
**chef troy ** is a very funny guy!
**lord Jim ** is an all around swell guy! (watch out if you’re a pretty waitress though! 
)
**Earthling ** is a quiet kinda guy
psiekier despite what he may think, he does not reek of “computer programmer”
**Balance ** is a the “pen&telleresque” uncle every kid wants. He also writes down EVERYTHING. woe be the person who says to him “I didn’t say that”
**Zyada & rjk ** are the kind of people that when you meet them, you feel like you’ve known them forever.
Bdgr I didn’t get to talk to him much as he was WAAAAAAY on the other side of the table. so… on the way home, the thought occured to me that the guy they kept calling badger was… BDGR (which I had been reading as initials). duh!!sometimes my brilliance amazes even me. I meant to thank BDGR for all the restaurant picks.
scotth and SO were also on the far end. They seemed like all around swell people too.
oh and the other obnoxiously loud couple who just would not stop talking!
I hope I didnt forget anyone.
and that I got your names right.
We look forward to the next DFW dope!
Here’s the pictures. I didn’t work very hard on the captions as you’ll notice.
Zyada’s B’day Celebration Pictures
Jim
I’m sorry this is so late, folks–Ericsson moved up the deadlines on a couple of my projects, so I’ve been working into the wee hours all week. I’ve only just finished typing everything up.
“Penn&Telleresque”–Babs, I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about me in ages. 
Now, without further ado, here be the Notes:
7:00–Arrived at Rocco’s to find Zyada, rjk & Nrs. H (is that right?–scotth’s SO) already in attendance. Zyada showed off her birthday gift to herself, a a rather nice Toshiba digital camera. The waiter came by and leveled the table.
I told Zyada about the theater garage sale I hit Saturday morning, and she sighed a little over lost craftly opportunities. I’m sure she was having more fun at the time than I was though…
rjk has been reading Marston–murder mysteries involving a theatre company in Elizabethan London
7:05–scotth, Cheffie, and Earthling arrive. Zyada had giggles over the card Cheffie got her. Still missing a few people.
Cheffie grudgingly admitted to having a twisted sense of humor.
<Brief pause as the Chronicler awaits a gasp of shock that never comes.>
psiekier, Bad News Baboon, and Mr. Bab arrive. Babs seems a bit uncomfortable with her screen name in person–I can’t imagine why.
The waiter distributed what appeared to be wonton chips, resulting in several surreptitious checks to confirm that we hadn’t wandered into a Chinese restaurant by mistake. Wonton chips with marinara sauce are, for the record, not a culinary triumph.
Cheffie noted that he found the sign on the table inappropriate–
"I can’t think of any word that less accurately describes a table of Dopers than “Reserved”.
Zyada got some CDs for her birthday–the soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou” and something called “Blues in the Night”. (British blues? The concept met with some disfavor at the table.)
7:15–bdgr arrived to find Cheffie complaining about gawker’s block on the way to Rocco’s–the highway was bogged down with morbid rubberneckers. He was also intimidated by the low fuel light, so he stopped for gas.
The oenophiles (mainly rjk, scotth, and Nrs. H) talk wine. I didn’t take notes on the details–I don’t speak Vino well enough. What’s wrong with screw-caps anyway? <GD&R>
bdgr works at Lockheed, and Zyada once did–they talked about job matters for a bit.
7:25–Zyada spent some time badmouthing the quality of Italian restaurants in the North Dallas/Plano area. She says she’s even seen roaches in one of them. Cheffie noted that it’s even scarier when the roaches are dead, and talked a bit about a greasy spoon he once frequented where any roaches that wandered in screamed and fled.
The oenophilia club grew a bit more comprehensible as scotth held forth on the quality of red wines. He claimed (to general agreement) that there’s less margin for error with reds–they’re either good, or very, VERY bad.
Downtable a bit, Cheffie’s head was swelling as psiekier complimented his cooking. Cheffie sheepishly admitted to having trouble finding hats. I sympathized, as every hat I put on my head winds up looking like a beanie. This, of course, led to several people claiming that they wanted propeller beanies, preferably battery-powered. I went off into engineer-land contemplating solar and thermoelectric powered propeller beanies, only to be drawn back by a comment from Cheffie:
QOOC: “Holy frappé, Blenderman!”
I later reconstructed from this a conversation on costumes, costume parties (Zyada thinks a Doper Halloween costume party would be neat), and someone who once attended such a party dressed as a blender (this was evidently the tenuous link leading back to beanies).
Babs quizzed everyone within reasonable conversational distance on where they are from.
7:30–Jim arrived. He got held up at the bait shop, but apparently they only got away with his survival instinct, as he managed to present Zyada with a birthday gift of “sparklies”. Specifically, sparkly lures he had picked up. He failed utterly at getting her to wear them as earrings, despite putting it to a popular vote. Evidently Zyadaland is not a democracy.
bdgr spoke of his last Dopefest, which consisted only of himself and Mercutio: “Never take a 16-year-old punk rocker as a tour guide.”
We got flashed by two of our number. Bloody dueling cameras.
Cheffie phoned Grace, but only got her voice mail.
psiekier likes a joint called Mike’s Treehouse on Greenville Ave, which (in true Doper free-association tradition) led us to learn that Chef Jr has a new treehouse. It’s not one of these ramshackle constructions we had as kids–it’s sturdy enough for grownups. It was built by the same guy who built the Chefs’ new deck.
Cheffie’s remodelling continues: He has some new flooring now. Zyada, cat-fancier that she is, wanted to know how the household felines have adapted. I think “zipzipzoom” sums up the response adequately.
Nrs. H and scotth try my mead, and offer mild approval. scotth has made mead before, and hopes someday to make a batch from orange blossom honey. I’d like to try it myself, but orange blossom honey is a bit scarce and expensive around here. I found myself pondering pepper mead for a moment before realizing that Cheffie was trumpeting the virtues of pablano peppers.
Babs was extracting psiekier’s life story without anaesthesia. He’s from the San Bernadino area and says that he much prefers Texas over California, mainly for the friendlier people and the availability of wide, open spaces.
QOOC: scotth–“Don’t do it in Vegas.”
Cheffie, Earthling, psiekier, and the Baboons were discussing the deficiencies of various burger joints. Keller’s, Burger House, and Cactus Jack were submitted as counterexamples.
7:50–bdgr returned to the subject of his last LADope. He wanted to the hotel from the Rockford Files (he’s something of a fan), but was again foiled by his choice of a tour guide. Mercutio had never heard of the show, much less the hotel. Some conversational current too subtle for the human eye swept that end of the table into a discussion of the B52s, particularly the date of their arrival from the dimension of infinite weirdness, and the first time everyone heard them.
Cheffie and psiekier talked about recent Straight Dope columns–Cheffie feels that the recent columns have been less earthshaking than, say, the duck quack column. He feels that the tone is now more cranky and less “roast the fools alive” than it once was.
Relevant quote (yes, I do these too, occasionally): “You could count on being torn to bits and left in the snow to quiver, and feel honored to do so. It’s like being stepped on by the great Hong Kong Fooey.”
Grace’s absence discussed. Zyada was getting a bit worried.
And now, a brief interlude for booze–I brought a recipe along because Ziactrice (how’d the filksinging lesson go, BTW?) mentioned picking my brain about brewing. scotth suggested that I include it in the notes, so here it is:
Traditional Mead
Ingredients for 5 gallons:
15 lbs (1 gallon + 1 quart) light honey
1 Tbsp gypsum
4 tsp. Acid blend
½ oz. Yeast extract
¼ tsp Irish moss powder (clarifier)
½ oz. Pris de Mousse wine yeast (or sweet mead yeast, if available)
Add the honey, gypsum, acid blend, and Irish moss to 1 ½ gallons of spring water and bring slowly to a boil. (Be careful, as it’s prone to frothing and boiling over.) Skim the foam off it’s albumen-type protein that will cloud the mead if not removed. Boil for at least 15 minutes longer if it’s still foaming significantly. Add 1 gallon of cold water to a glass carboy, then transfer the mead wort into the carboy and top off to 5 gallons with more later. Seal the carboy and shake it briefly to aerate the wort.
When the wort has cooled to below 80?F, rehydrate and pitch the yeast . I recommend mixing the dry yeast with ½ cup of water and a tsp of sugar and allowing it to pitch for 30 minutes before adding it to the wort. Seal the carboy with a fermentation lock and place it somewhere where it won’t be disturbed for a few months, ideally a dimly lit area that stays about 70F-80F. Allow it to ferment to completion. Check the water level in the fermentation lock regularly to maintain the seal and (in the later stages) to determine if fermentation is complete. Unlike beer, which generally reaches full fermentation in a matter of weeks,
mead will ferment for several months.
Once fermentation is complete, rack (transfer) the mead into a second carboy to clear. For a lighter mead, you can replace the liquid lost in the racking process with more water. Other flavorings can also be added at this point. My favorite additive is 2 cups of a tea-like brew of cloves and cinnamon, mixed with 5 tablespoons of good vanilla extract. Add the flavoring just after racking the mead, and shake it well, then allow it to clear. If a great deal of sediment collects on the bottom of the carboy, it may be worthwhile to
rack it back into the original carboy for a second settling period before bottling.
Equipment list:
2 5-gallon glass carboys
1 water-type fermentation lock and rubber stopper
1 siphon rod and cap for racking
3 gallon wort pot (a granite stewpot works well)
1 wooden spoon (for stirring the wort and dipping foam off)
Relax. Have a homebrew, as Papazian would say.
Cheffie misses Joe Bob Briggs in the local alternative paper.
scotth and rjk talked about different kinds of honey, comparing flavors.
Movies discussed. The waiter offers the information that his parents had seen “Spider-Man” and liked it. Cheffie and I still don’t approve of the organic webshooters. The fact that Peter Parker was capable of building the artificial webshooters reflects an important part of the character, in our not-so-humble opinions. The discussion lead psiekier to a virtuoso display of comic-book geekery, invoking the Beyonder, Venom, the Hulk, and Iron Man in one sentence.
The Loyal Order of Oenophiles went back into session. The mead discussion drifted downtable, with Earthling sampling the mead and approving of it. Hall of Hrothgar mentioned–sounds like great fun, except for the getting-ripped-limb-from-limb part.
QOOC:rjk–“There was a picture of a woman who won bigger tits in a bar contest.” Evidently they weren’t just talking wine, after all.
Earthling just got a garlic press. Cheffie claims that for someone who spends as much time in the kitchen as he does, he has remarkably few kitchen gadgets. Merits of garlic pressed, hand-minced, and pre-minced garlic discussed. The garlic ice cream at the Stinking Rose in San Francisco was invoked to prove a point (what point remains unclear). psiekier propounded the theory of isometric garlicosity–it’s OK to eat garlic as long as anyone you hope/plan/might happen to kiss eats an equal amount.
Earthling sagely commented, “More pesto!”
The oenophiles moved on to discussing cigarettes and the cigarette industry, but I lost the details to Cheffie’s monologue on fixing kitchen accidents with butter:
“There is no kitchen accident that can’t be fixed with mo’ butter.” At worst, he feels, you could always drag your SO off with a bucket o’ butter to reenact the last scene of “Last Tango in Paris”.
QOOC: Earthling–“Pork chop!” (Earthling seems prone to odd exclamations. It’s a bit like sitting next to Miss Manners with a mild case of Tourette’s.)
Smoothies and blenders discussed [insert your own blender joke here–we seemed stuck on the topic]. Pork chops and apple sauce in a blender–someone call Ben & Jerry’s, we’ve got a new recipe for them. They can call it “When Pigs Fly”. Sauerkraut Swirl is another possibility. This leads naturally into a renewed discussion of the supervillain Blenderman, now with the addition of his sidekick, Smoothie.
The wino section talked about “The Sopranos”, “Six Feet Under”, and “Frontier House” while the rest of us drew on the table for a bit. psiekier did a manga picture, while Cheffie worked on Blenderman and I made an offhanded stab at drawing profiles. Comics and web-comics discussed–Cheffie’s still planning on doing his comic strip, and he’s also looking for new web-comics to read. (I thought about recommending www.gpf-comics.com, but it’s been pretty depressing lately. With that warning, you can check it out if you like.) Cheffie thinks that “The Duplex”, a comic in a local paper, ripped off the “chick magnet” joke from Sluggy Freelance.
Zyada noted that she had started reading Sluggy. Yay, another convert!
rjk: “…comes by and sees him pounding the guy’s head. Then he said, ‘It’s OK, he’s from Barcelona…’” I confess that I know not what to make of this, but every scenario I’ve come up with has been pretty damn funny.
More web-comic/comic talk. Resemblance of PHB to W.A. Thornhump (of Bloom County) discussed. While it’s possible that the PHB’s evolution was influenced by Bloom County, some of suspect that Scott Adam’s doesn’t have the artistic ability to actually copy someone else.
Over in the vinyard, they revisited The Lumberjack Song.
scotth: “He’s a transvestite–that’s his dressing style–but his humor is SHARP!”
“Victor Victoria” discussed.
Cheffie’s bitter about the web-vultures picking Photopoint’s corpse. The only way he can get the photos he stored on Photopoint back is to pay an outrageous amount for a CD of them. While talking about some of the lost photos, he recounts Jim’s raccoon incident for the newcomers.
I got the flashfingers out, but my fingers were too damp to demonstrate it, so Cheffie did the honors.
Gary Larson discussed–I remember a panel consisting of an astronaut with a spray of red paint where his helmet should have been. It was entitled “Gesundheit”, and Larson said he drew it in an art class. scotth, who seems to have as many of the Far Side collections as I do, doesn’t remember seeing it, so I’ll have to look for it now. Pity, that means I have to read through my collection again. 
Zyada went to sit by Jim.
Cheffie recounted an Elvis party, which he attended as Evil Elvis and dueled with an Elvis impersator who showed up out of nowhere. There was some minor debate over the proper plural of Elvis–Elvises? Elvii?
Earthling: “Well, the plural of penis is penes, so it would be Elves…”
Balance: “That’s it–he’s not dead, he was taken by the Fey.”
Cheffie: “That would explain the outfits.”
QOOC:bdgr–“Computers are easier to fix than people.”
I hope he was talking about repair…
The powers of Smoothie (Blenderman’s sidekick, if you will recall) were determined to be a blinding smile and pickup lines that cause women to collapse in disgust.
Nrs. H likes gin-and-tonic. This was somehow tangentially related to a conversation about British humor in general and “Fawlty Towers” in particular. “He not rat…he hamster!”
Cheffie on Dana Carvey on “Why Chickens Make Lousy House Pets”.
psiekier commented on scotth’s resemblance to Nicholas Cage, then engages in delaying tactics and broad hinting in an effort to get agreement from others. Apparently, they discussed this at the gathering I missed at the Flying Saucer.
“There’s a Flying Saucer just around the corner.”
Balance: “Don’t tell anyone. I’m double-parked.” (Only bdgr heard this the first time, and I’m not letting the rest of you get out of it.)
More wine talk.
psiekier got a package from Antarctic Press the other day–he had no idea what it could be. It turned out to have a mundane explanation–he bought something on eBay from someone who worked there.
bdgr reminisced about his visit with Mercutio again–thinking about getting pulled over by a cop:
Cop: “Is this your son?”
bdgr: “No, he’s just some kid I met on an internet message board. He said we could have a Dopefest, so I flew in to meet him…Ow, ow, owowowowow!”
psiekier gave Zyada her birthday present, explaining that it was really a present for rjk–it was edible lotion.
Cheffie: “[psiekier] is the master of vicarious naughtiness.”
Lubricants discussed–silicone is deprecated. Earthling advocates the use of 5W40.
The pumpkin cheesecake is very tasty.
Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War discussed.
scotth strongly recommends Einstein’s Bridge for the hard SF fans among us, but couldn’t remember the author’s name. (He later recalled that it’s John Cramer.)
Cheffie still wants to have a karaoke night.
9:10–Piers Anthony dissed. Puns compared (unfavorably) to Spider Robinson’s Callanhan’s Place puns.
scotth’s favorite Niven/Pournelle novel is The Mote in God’s Eye, a choice that I can’t fault, despite my bias toward Dream Park (which spawned the Internation Fantasy Gaming Society, my favorite live-action roleplaying group).
rjk recently read Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, and summarized it for us–a shipwreck strands a rather unpleasant man in a land of literary allusions.
Cheffie was looking at the bill–“Shrimp Alf? Does it have cats in it?” I shudder to admit that I got the joke.
Zyada took pictures of the manga sketch psiekier drew on the table. He admonished her not to make a 1200k bitmap of it, as he plans to upload it to his webpage.
Another skirmish of the vi/eMacs Holy War: Earthling and psiekier like vi, which I find singularly incomprehensible. We agreed upon mutual tolerance, if not understanding.
Divvying up the tab–they don’t do split tickets at Rocco’s.
9:20–Did somebody call the cops on us, or did he just mistake this for a donut shop?
9:25–Still divvying the tab. Perhaps the considerable volume of wine consumed interfered. Zyada broke out the calculator.
bdgr’s an NT admin, with the usual complement of luser stories.
psiekier explained a running gag at his office: A couple of SE Asian execs have difficulty with the word “statistics”, rendering it instead as “status-sticks”. This lead some wag to get a supply of popsicle sticks from a craft shop, label them “Status”, and scatter them around.
More on accents: Zyada reported a Spaniard rendering “focus” as “fuck-us” in some work context or other. She also recently had cause to wonder when Looby’s started serving Vietnamese food, as she ordered chicken and was informed by the server that they only had “dog meat” (“dark meat”).
bdgr’s Columbian coworker had trouble with the company name “Fokker”.
Accents inevitably lead psiekier to movies (what doesn’t?), and he and Cheffie talked about “Johnny Dangerously”.
scotth recaps the “Deep in the Heart of Texas” joke from “Peewee’s Big Adventure”. He considers it the funniest part of the movie. I figure it doesn’t have much competition.
Sinking into new depths of banality, we talked about the weather (and griped about the weathermen). psiekier commented on the use of “weather bunnies”. I’ll leave it to him to elaborate, if he so chooses.
In retrospect, Cheffie considers the bullying he encountered in grade school uninspired.
Hacking, clueless lusers, and passwords discussed.
Cheffie on Stupid Things People Do to Get Fired: He specifically talked about M$ employees buying Xbox games at the company store (at a steep discount) and exchanging them at Target for games that sucked less. Of course, all those games are tracked…
Everyone lines up for pictures in front of the mural on the wall, “Heaven and Earth, with Pasta”–actually, the title was “The Creation of Pasta”, but I like mine better.
<hugs>Jim and Cheffie went back to the end of the hug line for seconds.
9:50–Departed Rocco’s, much to the relief of the wait staff. Cheffie complained about being “kicked out”. Some people left, some went to Half-Price Books, and some lingered for a bit to talk before going to HPB. I introduced everyone to my mummy (and her cat)–props I picked up that morning at the theater moving sale.
Well, I finally did it–I overran the message size limits (20000 characters, BTW). Anyway, here are the last few scraps:
Everyone left finally wandered over to HPB, mercilessly overcrowding the SF/Fantasy section. I found some Retief books, psiekier grabbed a Bolo book, and Zyada found something entitled “The History of Farting” (although I don’t know if she actually bought it or not.
People drifted out by ones and twos. bdgr and I were the last ones to split, engrossed as we were in telling gaming stories. The deterioration of the weather finally broke that up, as bdgr was on his motorcycle and didn’t like the look of the storm that was brewing.
Bloody find and replace–that would be “Mrs. H” throughout.
It was worth the wait, sweetheart!
Some clarifications. I was only dissing one restaurant, Italian Inn, and it’s in West Fort Worth. It’s an ooooollld restaurant which is rather cheesy - among other things they have doors on the booths so you can be “private” while eating. And they did have roaches crawling around on the floor when I went in High School. But they seem to have cleaned up since then - I did end up there on a blind date.
Depends on what time saturday morning.
[quote]
… something called “Blues in the Night”. (British blues? The concept met with some disfavor at the table.)
This is a musical done with old Blues standards, which was the main attraction at a mini-dopefest a couple of months ago. The only version I could find was the London cast album. Maybe they imported the cast members from Georgia.
No, it’s a benevolent theocracy. I’m a goddess! (You’ve heard about bread and circuses? How about beer and sex?)
Regarding mead made from orange blossom honey.
Try Sack ‘n’ Save, maybe in their mexican products area. Bob and I saw some respectable sized jars in the HEB area store.
vi rules!
Especially fun when he was saying “You need to focus on the requirements”. Work it out
You missed the “vision of hell” CD that I found: The FluffyButterfly Choir does Mariah Carey’s Greatest Hits"
I had tried ever so hard to block that out of my mind, thank you very much…Now I wont be able to sleep tonight.
I had purged that memory, too.
OTOH, can it really be worse than “Mariah Carey does Mariah Carey’s Greatest Hits”?
Wow.
Looking over Balance’s notes, I’m struck by two observations:
[ul][li]This has to be the most mentions I’ve ever received in a Dopefest recap.[/li][li]Apparently, I am not only devastatingly handsome, but an inexpressably witty raconteur as well. (a “raconteur,” of course, is “someone who runs a restaurant for raccoons.”)[/ul][/li]
I mean, really. Apparently I didn’t shut up all night except for a few seconds to wolf down my food. How on earth did all you folks manage to stay awake?