Are you an extreme meat lover? Do you visit obscure places just to sample their one-of-a-kind meat? Do you crave the culture, the people, and traditions that surround all things meat as well? Are you constantly on the hunt for the next big meaty trend out there? Looking to try the latest and greatest way people are acquiring, preparing, serving and chowing down on their meat?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, YOU might be the star of our new show!! We are casting the following nationally: MALE MEAT-EATING ENTHUSIASTS: Looking to cast males who appear any age and any ethnicity, who fully embrace absolutely everything meat culture has to offer—on and off the plate. Specifically casting foodies who are involved in all sorts of meat-related food sub-cultures, eating rituals or anything that has to do with the creative, fanatic desire to hunt, prepare and eat a variety of meats in a variety of ways.  We are also open to meat loving families and friends (i.e. fathers and sons, best guy friends, brothers, cousins etc).

If interested, please submit your photo and contact information to: meatfanatic@gmail.com

Sounds like a pretty good gig. Just tell ‘em The Butcher sent you.

When he appeared at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square Tuesday to celebrate the release of his latest tome of put downs, musings, humor and rage, “Medium Raw,” fittingly, Bourdain read a passage about his waning anger, introducing the reading by saying when he started writing he thought this would be his warm and fuzzy book. His rage has dissipated, and he’s worried about becoming “a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. ‘Rachel Ray? What’s up with that?’ (Cue snare drum here.)  To a great extent that’s already happened.” To wit, on one occasion he received a fruit basket from Ray.

But obviously Bourdain didn’t write a gentle light-hearted book that gives blow jobs to all his past targets. No, there is one old foe he still has genuine contempt for, and that foe comes in many guises, from Jonathan Safran Foer to Sire Paul McCartney. “Okay,” he read, “I am genuinely angry — still — at vegetarians. That’s not shtick.”

But it is shtick to a degree, albeit shtick backed up by pages upon pages of lucid explanation. And the crowd — the massive seething crowd — ate it up. They filled the entire top floor of the Barnes & Noble, panting, yelling, frothing at the mouth and swooning over Mr. Bourdain: a TV food personality who made his name lambasting TV food personalities. Of course, to the cult of Bourdain he is much more than that. More than the guy who founded meat palace Les Halles, the closest thing New York has to a classic Parisian bistro. More than an acerbic curmudgeon. More than a chef without an apron. More than a former addict. More than a New York Times best selling author, who in addition to writing the memoirs he’s known for, is also pioneering a new genre of fiction: the food crime mystery. More than a cartoon amalgam of angry man parts. More than a raised eyebrow and a smirk. More than the sum of self-satisfaction and self-loathing.

And they love him for it. All of it. He’s got groupies galore. You half expected them to start flinging bras and panties on the stage. In fact, some are so amorous that his martial-arts trained wife has learned to lean in and tell them things like “Back off or I’ll smash your fucking face,” Bourdain writes in his book.

The staff at B&N gamely tried to keep the crowd in check, though it seemed a Sisyphean task, and during the Q&A they assembled two or three separate lines of people eager to get their books signed. The lines snaked around the room in Medusa tangles. Many of the assembled masses seemed more anxious to get the book signed than actually listening to its author speak. For example, three young ladies, even as they pushed and shoved their way onto a book-signing line, seemed incapable of shutting the fuck up for three seconds so that they or anyone around them could hear the answers to the questions asked of the illustrious author whose bones they kept talking about jumping.

Bourdain entertained questions genially and at length, though the unruly crowd tended to shout things at the stage that weren’t really questions, but more like demands for recitations. Yelling “HOW TO GRILL A STEAK” at the top of your lungs from the back of a bookstore (mind you from a distance of at least 100 yards) at Anthony Bourdain  is along the lines of screaming “PLAY FREEBIRD” at a Skynyrd concert at a county fair in Des Moines.

To his credit Bourdain just laughed and mused “Is that a question?” Though later on when someone asked (politely and with the aid of a microphone) how Bourdain makes a hamburger he dutifully obliged. (The answer, in a nutshell: one leg at a time.)

When Bourdain was asked about the true identity of Ruth Bordain, a Twitter mashup of somebody’s idea of a cross between him and Ruth Reichl, Bourdain said he’s got some idea of who he or she might be — some suspects — but that he thinks it’s hilarious and he hopes the tweeter, who has been going strong since March and has more than 8,000 followers, goes on forever.

“I’ve been a parody of myself for so long, it’s good to have an official parody,” Bourdain quipped.

He joked that he could end up with some sort of two part William Shatner career, where he spends the second half making fun of the first half.

During the grueling book-signing portion of the even-tempered Bourdain remained affable tapping his cowboy boots along to the Stones “Exile on Main Street” (which played through twice in its entirety). He played the rogue at times, as the bookstore staff went through the motions of hiding-but-not-hiding the Brooklyn Lager they filled his mug with (which explains the smile). He seemed like nothing so much as a politician, shaking hands, smiling for all the pictures, and, yes, even cooing at and kissing babies.

Sign. Smile. Repeat. This is what becomes a man who maybe was driven by some demons once. Who drank snorted, sniffed and smoked his way into a caricature. Who now has eased into himself and is a aging gracefully.

“It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachel [Ray's] world. Me? You? We’re just living in it,” Bourdain writes in the new book. It’s a good line, but he’s wrong. It’s Tony’s world.  Sandra and Rachel? Well, they’re renting with an option to buy.

“I am going to write poem

about Jonathan Safran Foer,” he declared.

“I’m not going to like it,” she said,

then laughed in spite of herself, because

he’d made a reference to a part of JSF’s anatomy.

But she wasn’t actually laughing at that.

She had thought of something silly and domestic she had done earlier, like maybe she had picked up the wrong toothbrush or tried to use her flatiron before plugging it in.

But the Safran Foer poem did not amuse her,

how he started slowly at first,

putting French string beans up there,

but the limp ones tended to bend and break apart.

Then he got more bold,

experimenting at first with sugar snap peas then carrots,

before moving on to cucumbers.

Boldness grabbed hold, and he worked an entire zucchini in,

and clenching it, he eyed the summer squash, lustily.

“When I accepted my New York Public Library Young Lion, I had three turnips and a large leek secreted away,” JSF confessed. Then he added, “There on the steps beside Bryant Park, those leafy vestiges poked out and tickled my skin.”

But he never felt satisfied,

always left wanting more,

insatiable, hungry,

empty.

Senior Platty Pants once referred to it as the ultimate drunk food.

It has been a stalwart of the Knot’s menu since it opened. Sure, the sublime bacon and liver sandwich has come and gone (unceremoniously ripped from the menu when Baco left) and come (to cheers all around) and gone again (with the new Mexican menu by recent arrival Sue Torres). But through it all the pretzel dog has never wavered.

As NBC New York rightly points out, it remains the lone holdover from the old menu to stave off the “disappointment-fueled riots that would likely ensue.”

A waitress at the dive paid tribute to the dog, telling a customer, “I’d quit if they took off,” but the she added wryly, “I don’t want to deal with that.”

The one thing is off the menu though is the vaunted dog and Busch draft special. For just a 5-spot any Joe could walk in off the street, get himself  a so-salty-it-hurts dog with mustard and a cool Busch  draft to quench his thirst. “The Special” is no longer listed on the menu, however, if you ask for it, they still give it to you.

Because ones manhood obviously has everything to do with eating meat. Or faux meat, as the case may be.

Food Swings’ mission is not to make healthy food. Instead it provides a much needed fix for native midwesteners who moved to Brooklyn, bought skinny jeans, rejected the Middle American gluttony of their parents and yet still crave a Big Mac.

“We are not immune to the pull of tasty foods and we want to be able to eat them too, but without any harm coming to animals,” Swings told Green Planet. “So we go out of our way to create vegan versions of foods people say they wouldn’t be able to ‘live without’ if they went vegan; well, now they don’t HAVE to live without them!”

To that end, the chef who invented the Handwich should really be thanking KFC for the inspiration. And while most people are not attempting to eat ten of them, some of these crazy, manly vegans “like it so much, they eat one and come back to the counter and order one to go, too!”

It’s true, the video of the fan getting tasered at Citizen’s Bank Park was shocking at first. Yes, he goes down like a bolted steer, and it was somewhat gruesome to see. Then we thought, well, there are some people who should be tased, deserve it, in fact. We don’t mean people who run out onto the pitch during sporting events. No. We are referring, of course, to Philly fans.

Which then got us thinking, there are probably plenty of other people who could use a good tasering (though not college kids badgering political has-beens). To wit, our list:

1. Those who order steaks “rare-plus”
2. People who ask the waiter what to order
3. Those who send dishes back to the kitchen consistently
4. People who pant at bacon
5. Anyone who thinks gummy bacon is a real gas
6. An executive at BP for every time we bite into a crab, oyster or fish that could have come from the Gulf but now has to come from somewhere else
   
7. “Celebrity” chefs
8. People who brag about buying ramps at the greenmarket
9. People who overcook steaks
10. People who use gas “grills”
11. Snarky food bloggers
12. Those who feel the need to follow recipes to the last letter
13. People who brag about the gross offal they ate
14. Those who are grossed out by offal
15. Those who text while walking
16. People who walk too slow
17. Kids on scooters on the sidewalk
18. Those who use “ethically-sourced,” “local,” “organic,” and “biodynamic” in the same sentence
19. People who get the words wrong
    
20. Glenn Beck every time he opens his mouth
21. Vegans who try to make you feel inferior
22. Those who give vegetarians a hard time
    
23. People who show up at the Spotted Pig to get a table an hour before it opens
24. Those who write lists of 100 things a server should never do in the Times
25. Bloggers who make inane lists

Now the Australian government and certain entrepreneurial butchers are asking the country to consider the meat of another wild (albeit once servile) beast, the camel. Unlike the native Kangaroo, which does not harm the root systems of native grass, the camel, brought over in the 19th century to transport goods, is wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem. According to The Atlantic Online, the Australian government is currently planning to “cull” (round up and slaughter) 349,000 camels because, without any natural predator, their population is doubling every 10 years. Garry Dann, the owner of an isolated meat store who also runs the slaughterhouse Centralian Gold, told The Atlantic, “It’s a good meat, low in cholesterol. I would hate to see it go to the worms.”  Weighing in at 700-900 pounds, it would certainly feed a lot of worms. And that hump!  So proudly has it supported the likes of Aladdin and Lawrence of Arabia, it is also considered a delicacy in some camel-consuming countries.

But Australians, like most Westerners, are not as eager to adopt wild meat as one would hope. The CEO of Safefood Queensland told The Atlantic that even Kangaroo meat, while considered acceptable by most is not wildly popular: “It should really be put on a show like MasterChef, to encourage people to cook with it,” she says.

While The Food Network could be part of a solution, there remains the problem of its name. Lacking a euphemism like “ham” for pigs or “beef” for cattle, which both distract the consumer from thinking of the animal from which their meal was “culled,” the word Kangaroo brings to mind fun, cuddly creatures like Skippy from the popular 1960s television series. To address this issue, the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia (KIAA) launched a competition in 2005 to give the marsupial an appetite-inducing pseudonym. The winner? “Australus.” No, it did not catch on.

One thing that the camel may have going for it though is that it is ugly. And dumb. Which, at least by American standards, are both things that would seem to make it more palatable than the cute and cartoonish Kangaroo.

By the way, the KIAA has some great-looking recipes for Skippy.

But when you’ve got friends like Brooklyn Star has, you don’t stay down long. An all-star cast have assembled the Brooklyn Star Hootenanny on Friday, March 26 to help raise the restaurant from the ashes.

The event will be hosted by Brooklyn Kitchen Labs with smoked meat coming courtesy of the Meat Hook, beer from Brooklyn Brewery and whiskey by Whiskey Town. Wilfie & Nell will also lend a hand, and Brooklyn Star will dish its own brisket and shrimp and grits. Momofuku Milk Bar will bring desert.

Also on hand, oyster shucking and carnival games, one of which, according to Grub Street, will be a bearded hipster dunk tank — worth the price of admission alone.

Get your tickets here for $50 now, or wait till Friday and pay $75 at the door.

Chelsea Papaya on 23rd Street and Seventh Ave has torn down its classic boardwalk-evoking sign. (You remember, it had a cartoon bald man stuffing a hot dog into his mouth — and if it looked a little phallic, so what? It’s Chelsea).

But what it has replaced the signage with is puzzling at best. The store now looks  like an all-night shop in some Tokyo red light district that carries Manga porn and has peepshow booths. Which some might consider a step up, we suppose. Of course some people are into watching cartoons of robots diddling young schoolgirls.