Just for a quick reference, this is Henry Rollins' second time on Nat Geo Wild: He previously hosted "Snake Underworld," where he sat around and watched a guy shoot up black mamba poison. Why? Because that is how Rollins rolls, yo. And because it makes for some great television.

I'm guessing "Animal Underworld" is going to be a lot like this clip, except with grosser stunts ("Watch me drink this lemur piss!") and more public advocacy for not doing horrible things to animals ("Please don't capture endangered lemurs to drink their piss, good sir"). According to National Geographic's senior V.P.:

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It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, "What makes duck more delicious than onions?" And also this: "In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won't be here anymore."

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Only it's not really so simple. Have you ever found yourself tipping a server differently because they were good-looking? Or because you were embarrassed by your dad's off-color jokes? Or even because they sassed you, but they sassed you in all the right ways?

While writing the story yesterday on the very odd (and, to my mind, very disturbing) relationship between the abusive customers and staff at a Chicago hot dog stand, I recalled an old waiter friend telling me that he liked to approach his tables with an aloofness, but also with charm, so that they would work to win his approval ... and that usually meant a bigger tip.

So I called Steve Dublanica, author of the blog and book "Waiter Rant" and the forthcoming "Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper's Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity," to talk about the relationships -- and strategies -- of tippers and tip-getters.

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As Severson writes, "a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested." Among the examples of this haute pothead cuisine are Roy Choi's Kogi taco trucks (which fuse Mexican and Korean food), New York's Momofuku Milk Bar (which serves things like "cereal milk" soft serve), Roberta's in Brooklyn (with its breakfast burrito pizza) and Animal in L.A. (which serves an upscale version of French Canadian poutine, composed of French fries, cheddar and gravy).

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"The first warning is when you see the parents enter the restaurant with a stroller the size of a KIA. From there they will ensure that no one enjoys their dinner until after they're gone. I sincerely think it's intentional," a commenter on Serious Eats replied to a poll on whether children should be allowed in high-end restaurants. Granted, this commenter calls him/herself "Leper," so there may be something else going on psychologically there, but that level of animosity, resentment and contempt is not out of range for what I hear uttered about parents with kids at tables.

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Colicchio, whose numerous restaurants include Craft, Craftsteak and the recently opened Colicchio & Sons in New York, was named outstanding chef during an awards ceremony that is considered the Oscars of the food world. It's an honor for which he'd been a finalist seven other times since 2002, the same year the organization named Craft the nation's best new restaurant.

Though Colicchio drew many accolades early in his career, he rose to prominence in 1994 when he and partner Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern, which earned Colicchio three stars from The New York Times and several Beard awards, including best chef in New York City in 2000 and outstanding restaurant service in 2001.

Colicchio's cookbook, "Think Like a Chef," earned him a Beard cookbook award in 2001. More recently, he's become known for his role as the lead judge on the Bravo television series, "Top Chef."

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Waffle House is the unofficial flower of the Southern Interstate. Driving back north from the Gulf Coast on I-65, their yellow signs blossom in hamlets from Alabama to Kentucky. I've taken this route for years now, but my mother has thwarted every one of my romantic urges to pull in for a waffle, to meet locals and chitchat with a folksy waitress holding a coffeepot. Finally, this year, somewhere near Franklin, Tenn., I convinced her to give it a try.

On the way in, we were stopped by a gravel-voiced, sun-damaged woman in a Gatlinburg sweat shirt with silk-screened horses. "Where are y'all headed?" she asked, taking a drag off her cigarette. I told her we were on our way home to Michigan. "Must be snow there," she said, "we're out looking for snow." We live with shovels and kitty litter in our trunks from October to April, so the idea of "looking for snow" was highly amusing, but there had been a rare blizzard across the deep South the day before, and apparently Ms. Gaitlinburg and her crew were really driving around looking for snow. We wished her safe travels, and found ourselves a booth.

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Logic dictates that you have to look at the numbers. There are 540 calories in KFC's Double Down, about the same as McDonald's suddenly quaint Big Mac. But the Double Down, and everybody's peeking-through-covered-eyes reaction to it, is not about logic. It's about balls.

The balls of a fast food chain, in the middle of rational America's hand-wringing about obesity and sustainable eating, to come out with a sandwich made of bacon, cheese, mayo-ish sauce and two slabs of fried chicken as the bread. The balls of KFC, which, in the weak-willed '90s, changed its brand from Kentucky Fried Chicken to its lame initials because it didn't want you to have to say the word "fried" every time you spoke its name. The Double-D is so macho, so deeply, dumbly dude, it's a sandwich for people who want to take down Michelle Obama in an arm wrestle.

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So when a chef in Canada got canned last week for speaking a little too frankly to a journalist about life in his kitchen, Tim Hayward speculated in the Guardian that the chef may have just been trying to join Bourdain's party: "By telling the gritty truth like 'chef' [Gordon] Ramsay does it, surely he should have expected admiration, kudos and unlimited girls ..." But for the chef's sake, I hope not. Because that ship has sailed -- a culture drowning, ironically, in the very waves of celebrity Bourdain helped to create.

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With a deft pinch of his chopsticks, the wriggling, still-alive limb is in his mouth and down his throat.

Raisher, 28, smiles. It's what brought him to his local food adventure club, one of a handful of groups dedicated to dining on exotic and bizarre foods from New York to Denver to San Francisco.

The iron-stomached champions of New York City are the Gastronauts, who meet monthly to feast on foods many wouldn't consider, such as pig hearts and intestine in vinegar, goat kidneys or sauteed lamb's brains.

"Nothing's off the table," said co-founder Curtiss Calleo, who grew up in Austria and Italy and wants to bring Old World curiosity to New York plates. "Any restaurant worth its salt has sweetbreads or tongue or pork bellies. There's a food renaissance going on."

Offal is old hat for groups like the Boston Gastronauts and the Organ Meet Society of New York City. There are groups devoted to eating only insects and some that venture into extreme territory, like the San Francisco Food Adventure Club that recently organized a human placenta tasting (the dinner had to be canceled due to potential formaldehyde exposure).

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I couldn't tell what the man was looking at since he was trying to peer into one of the upper floors, but he stood stock still in the harsh glare of the security spotlight, looking like he was about to get sucked into a UFO by a tractor beam.

"Excuse me," I said. He came out of his Close Encounters of the Third Kind stare and I realized I willed myself to say something before I knew what to say. So I went, "Uh ... can I help you?" sounding like someone trying not very hard to sell him a television.

"Oh, hi," he said. Then, realizing why I was approaching, he said, "Oh, I live here. I'm just waiting for my girlfriend to toss some takeout at me."

"Excuse me?" I asked. "Someone is going to throw dinner at you?"

Just then he looked back up, and out of the glare of the security lamp, I could see the silhouette of a woman's head poke out from a window. She waved. "Hi, Babe!" she called in a dulcet tone while dangling a package much larger than I am comfortable seeing seven stories above my head.

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When I fell into this thing, this cosa nostra of cuisine, it was by accident. I had a background in fine art, and I was seduced by the creative process of cooking and the satisfaction of making things with my hands. Fifteen years later, I've been a baker, a line cook, a sous chef, now a pastry chef, and I can't imagine doing anything else. But back then, I never planned to make a career out of it, and the "foodie" culture we know today was still in its infancy. Back then, people still craved what came out of kitchens more than access into them.

Now, fueled by cooking shows and the Web, we have a culture of cuisine-as-entertainment. We're barraged by food porn, coffee-table cookbooks, and gritty tell-alls of the professional kitchen. Customers are constantly looking for what's new, the next big thing. As a professional, I've seen this culture make certain cooks hungry for stardom, hoping to be on TV shows and in magazines. But I've also seen that interest in cuisine shrink the world, making exotic ingredients more accessible, and push us to keep discovering new flavors and learning new techniques. It's a truly exciting time to be a chef, but it's always taken certain kinds of personalities to excel in cuisine, to have that geeky kind of masochism that drives us to aspire, impossibly, to perfection in both art and athleticism.

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"Menus," he said, "are supposed to be the classic example of free choice, but menu designers have found that there're many ways of getting you to order what the restaurant wants you to order" -- the most profitable dishes, presumably.

The techniques he laid out are fascinating: a box drawn around certain items, for instance, always draws the eyes -- and attention -- there. This might mean these dishes best highlight the kitchen's skills, or, more likely, they make the restaurant the most money: The ingredient cost is low, or maybe they take the least staff time to prepare.

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As Moskin writes, many chefs are increasingly using Twitter, blogs and other websites to get even with people who are getting on their nerves. They're hitting back at critics (Kitchen Cabinet member Amanda Cohen took to her website to rebut her restaurant's New York Times dining section review). They're sniping at each other (NY restaurateur Joe Dobias attacked superstar chef David Chang, Baohaus' Eddie Huang called one of his competitor restaurants a "hellhole"). They're striking back at uninformed bloggers (LA chef Ludovic Lefebre's wife, Kristine, reduced one food blogger to tears by pointing out that her husband's tuna tartare isn't "underdone," that's the way it's meant to be), and taking user-reviewers to task (California chef Jason Neroni's Twitter stream: "Yelp is for cowards.") Oof. It's like the Wild West out there!

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Alan Richman, of GQ magazine and the most decorated food writer known to man, thinks the jig is up: Though he ripped his trademark witticisms, his eyes grew sad under his bushy eyebrows as he lamented the loss of detailed, crafted reviews in favor of "something like my blog posts, which I have to finish in half a day." Critics can no longer "appeal to a higher authority," he says, and find it difficult to be "constantly attacked." "Every time I write something, hundreds of people call me an asshole," he said, though to be frank I thought I also detected a hint of pride in that statement.

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