The piece—a meticulous investigation into the food-safety practices of Cargill and its suppliers, including revelations that some slaughterhouses refuse to sell to companies that test their meat for E. Coli and that some pre-made hamburgers contain meat that was treated with ammonia—has no doubt launched 1,000 vegetarians.

So we were surprised when a tipster pointed out this morning that Cargill was, as of about 11 a.m., advertising on the Times web site. It wasn't a rebuttal ad, just a run-of-the-mill branding campaign, apparently. We asked a Cargill spokesman why his company was underwriting the operations of a paper that just skewered it: "In answer to your question, it is random—advertising schedules are done months in advance."

Also:

Tuesday, December 4
I had a quick coffee at Balthazar, because I live a block away, with another person that's helping me out with another restaurant. I finally made it to Equinox on Crosby and Prince and got a yogurt and granola with fresh fruit at 'wichcraft at Equinox.

Then I didn't eat again till dinner that night. I went to Marlow & Sons and had roast chicken and a lot of Blue Point oysters — I think we had twelve. Then I came back to my restaurant where it was a really busy Tuesday night. At midnight I cooked scallops for the guys in the kitchen, showing them a new way. So I ended up eating six dayboat diver scallops. I'm always in the kitchen cooking, whether it's for me or one of the little line cooks ... we'll try to make Mexican or something.

Anthony Martignetti Plots a New Restaurant Over Croissants at Pastis

"Oh, snickersnatch, cheer The Past up. I'm down in the dumps."

"Sounds pretty bad."

"So bad I was crying to a Janet Jackson song."

"That's pretty severe. Has this been going on for a while?"

"No, my depression started when I did a line off a pierced cock in a bathroom stall at Hell!"

"Drugs in a bathroom in hell? Are you sure you didn't just have a bad dream?"

"Not that hell. Hell in the new gayborhood, the Meatpacking District. It's this brand new lounge. Very upscale compared to Mother and The Lure. And convenient to Florent."

"Oh, you've mentioned Florent before. But you had a bad time there?"

"No I was having a great time. I got together with my ex, Luis, and we wanted to check out something 'not in the East Village,' just to try something new. So around ten we started our night by cabbing over to Gansevoort Street. The place has a simple metal sign out front so it was a little hard to find at first, but then we walked through the heavy metal doors and inside the place was bursting with boys."

"Sounds like fun so far."

"And it was for awhile. You walk in and there were black leather banquettes and chairs and stools and people were, like, sitting. The bar took up two sides of a back corner and was really cute. In fact everything, there in the middle of the Meatpacking District was 'cute.' Even the drinks. We're used to the 'vodka cran' crowd, but everyone was drinking cosmos, sloshing them around in martini glasses. All this cuteness should have been a warning sign."

"Warning?"

"Of the evil that was to come. The cuteness was just one sign though. The DJ was playing Spice Girls. And he even played En Vogue. Not the good stuff, but the new stuff, without Dawn Robinson? Just not the same. And then there were the clothes on the boys. Dolce and Comme de Garcon and Versace, all very 'constructed' and 'tailored' and 'fitted'. No Bikkemberg or Dries Van Notten. And certainly no vintage Adidas track pants like mine."

"Vintage? Like from Salvation Army?"

"I'm not that ambitious. I just go to the shops on East Sixth. Anyway, so after a few drinks we got friendly with some of the guys. Over the wailings of Mariah Carey, we got an invitation to make a run to the bathroom. Four of us fit in a stall—gotta love the handicapped. And everybody was doing little key bumps and I, being a little tipsy, was all, 'Just make me a line.' And this other guy was all, 'Only if you do it off my dick,' which I thought was lame, but whatever. He pulls it out and it's a Prince Albert model. With a piercing at the tip? Which explains why he wanted everyone to see it, the freak."

"And this is when your depression began?"

"Well, no! At that moment I was like crazy-euphoric. But once the burning started, I realized what was going on. It wasn't coke on the cock. It wasn't coke at all! It was crystal. Fucking Tina!"

"Well, I've warned you before...."

"If I had known, it wouldn't have happened. The next thing I know there's twelve of us in two cabs headed to an apartment on East 16th between Fifth and Sixth. Really nice place, but then I saw the 72-pack of Trojans, and Luis and I just looked at each other and shrugged. Anyway, two days later, we're sitting in the apartment, still awake and listening to Janet Jackson and sobbing. 'The Velvet Rope.' It's way deep. You should check it out cuddlecunt."

"Oh, um, okay. Not my usual thing really."

"'What about the times you said you didn't fuck her. She only gave you head. What about that, what about that.' That Janet. She's a poet. She's got such a great future ahead of her! I'm going to try to go to sleep now. It's been three days. Talk soon."

Previously: The Death of Wigstock

Mr. Noonan said in a low voice, "Hey, come look at this." The glare of his flashlight showed a male frog locked onto the back of a female twice his size. "They're in amplexus," Mr. Barker said, using the polite biological term, and the Latin word, for embrace. Some embrace. It's more like a lock hold. The male atop the female grasps her with his forelegs and hangs on for dear life as he fertilizes the eggs she releases into the water, all the while fending off other males trying to depose him.

Frogs Go Bump In the Night

"Hello?"

"Wrigglerump? Is that you?"

"I would think The Past would recognize my voice by now."

"Sorry. I'm a little groggy. Took a Percocet."

"Your recreational drug use—"

"Listen here, Judge Mental. You go and get hit by a cargo van on the West Side Highway and see if you don't want to take a pill or five."

"You were hit by a ..."

"Anyway, mon putain pour pamplemousse, everybody knows that Percocets are dirty highs and that the anti-addictive additives that are in them give you a pill hangover the next morning. If I had my druthers, I'd have crushed up the new kid in town, Oxycontin, and snorted it right up."

"Okay, fine, but what were you doing on the West Side Highway?"

"I bought these new things, Rollerblades? They're like roller skates, but the wheels are lined up like ice skates. Anyway, I was rolling down Christopher Street and waiting at the corner for the light to change. There were these three Jersey-looking queens prancing and singing 'Gypsy Woman.' By Crystal Waters? Oh. And I guess I should mention that I was a little stoned."

"Well, that's sort of a given."

"Right? So they were all in unison, 'As she stands there singing for money,' and I started to cross. Then, ka-wham! Moving van."

"That's horrible!"

"But it was so worth it. Those Jersey queens were all up on the van. They opened the passenger door, and were waving Lee Press-Ons in the driver's face and screaming, 'Sue her! Sue her!' and 'Murder!'"

"So what did you do?"

"Got up, poured some water on my bleeding knee and went to the piers."

"But you were injured!"

"Who isn't in this town? Anyway, I saw Candace and Girlina on the other side of the street and wanted to say hello. Their night at Crow Bar is my favorite."

"CroBar?"

"Yeah, Crow Bar. Anyway I chatted them up, reminded them to take their One-A-Days and rolled to the main pier off Christopher. It was a good day to be out. Somebody had a gigantic ghetto-blaster playing some Danny Tenaglia mixes, and the queens were working it out. Then I rolled over to the better pier."

"Better?"

"Yeah, you have to go through a hole in the chain-link fence. It's all decrepit and there are holes in the asphalt floor where you can see right down to the river. Toward the end there are concrete barricades, and just over those are all the nudie-boys."

"What's a nudie-boy?"

"Oh, just guys lying out in the sun, nude. Granted most of them aren't really there to get sun. In fact some of them have little screens set up to block the sun and just want to give schlong shows. Sometimes you'll see some people hook up, more toward sundown."

"Well, I've read about the piers and how they were just massive orgy-pits."

"Not really, tickletongue. That's more the Distant Past. Things are very discreet now. Much more conservative. I haven't seen someone get fucked on the pier in, gods, weeks. So after a while I got tired of blading around, so I smoked up for the trip home. But smoking made me lazy, so I went to the parking lot down below Houston Street, jumped in some married guy's car, and let him diddle me for a bit."

"You had sex in a parking lot?"

"Nah, I just put out enough to get him to the manipulability point. Then I convinced him to give me a ride back to the Lower East Side. Married guys from Jersey. They're all so nice."

"Actually there was a New Jersey Governor..."

"Whoa. Stop. I don't 'do' politics. Do people still go to the piers?"

"I actually went last weekend. There's like a nice park from Battery Park all the way up the West Side now. Trees and bushes and flowers."

"Ha! I bet there's a lot of frolicking there!"

"Well, yeah, there was frolicking, but..."

"Whoa. Heh. I, wow—I should let you go. This pill's really starting to kick. La da dee la dee da ... La da dee la dee da."

Earlier: Past, Over

Apple's Third Store to Open in Meathpacking District [Apple Insider]

"Alan Linn, an ex-manager of the infamously rowdy English club Blacks, and partner Steve Ruggi are vetting applications to something called Norwood... According to its promo material, Norwood is looking for tweedier and artsier types..."Membership criteria are not based on fame or wealth," the material insists, "but by talent."

Recently valued at $9,770,000, the house was built in 1847 by developer and stockbroker Andrew Norwood and marked "the beginning of 14th Street's brief fashionable era." For much of the 20th century, the mansion was owned by another developer, Raf Borello. According to a 2006 NYT article

, ...the brick Greek Revival town house on the street's north side near Seventh Avenue stands out like a trumpet blast. Its black doors, bearing the address in gold leaf, almost glow, and a cast-iron balcony sets off the parlor windows, which stretch from the floor nearly to the 14-foot ceiling. Inside is a perfectly preserved 1847 mansion, with 13 fireplaces, huge mahogany doors and intricate plaster crown moldings along the ceilings. Hidden touches abound, like the carved bird pecking a flower among the mantelpiece's Carrara marble foliage.

Eight-story high, freeway-style biillboards, like the one the Hotel Gansevoort has erected on Hudson Street, do not belong in our neighborhood. In fact, billboards of this size and nature destroy the very qualities that make the West Village and the Meat Packing District so unique and desirable. The Hotel Gansevoort greatly benefits from the character and appeal of our neighborhood. Now it is resolutely destroying it.

Armin to Get You Hammered: Bungalow 8 Doorman Is Opening His Own Joint [NYO]

An important note on this conflict: Until we saw this picture in Page Six, we did not know that McNally's ally in the anti-billboard crusade, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation director Andrew Berman, was so smokin' hot. He looks like Lex Luthor's entitled nephew! Now we'd really like to see him spank Achenbaum. We love preservation and shit now!

Peace Parley Over Hotel Sign [NYP]
Previously: McNally v. Gansevoort: A Fight "To The Grave"!

It's pricey, trendy, and rife with ready-made puns (all of which are too cheap, even for us). It s also dead on the inside and will steal your soul if you look directly at it. Few neighborhoods have undergone the type of unnatural beautification of the Meatpacking District, so horrific and faux that it would make Tara Reid's nipple blush. Join Gawker's Andrew Krucoff and photographer Nikola Tamindzic in a photo walking tour of a Friday night in the Meatpacking District, where they soak in the Gaslight and let everyone else show us how it all hangs it out.

Joined by NYC native John Carney, we start at the Highline Bar/Restaurant (835 Washington St. @ Little W. 12th St.) where the vibe is decidedly more future-mod than abandoned railroad tracks. Downstairs you'll find a lounge with the always angular Asians, DJs visible by a cubbyhole in the wall, and the club's three-story waterfall which ends here in a pool of floating white balls. This place only needed Jules Asner circa Wild On... to make it complete. Instead, you get a door man wearing a cowboy hat.

We then walked north on Washington St., quickly shuffling past the honks and tonks of Hogs & Heifers (859 Washington St. @ 13th St.) and trying not to look directly into the gaze of bachelorette parties.

Turning a right onto 14th St. we pass the McBoutiques of Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen before coming upon the night's first of many "time-outs" outside of the Lotus nightclub (409 W. 14th St.).

Crunch had their holiday party there on Friday and while we just missed the reported girls-kissing good times inside, we did see this young reveler out front working on a new ab exercise. Don't worry, she never left the careful observation of her personal trainer.

A couple doors down at Son Cubano (405 W. 14th St.) you don't need to hear the Ramones singing "This ain't Havana" to be reminded that you're neither in the swingin' 50's or Cuba. To demonstrate, this is patron Carla who is Portuguese and grew up in Queens. She designs her own bags, works for Victoria's Secret, and enjoys the Meatpacking District about every other weekend. The food looked good, but we d be damned if we touched it.

The corner of 14th St. and 9th Ave. is occupied by the Gaslight Lounge. If you're shut out of everywhere else you can fall back on this big living room. Pictured above is doorman Alex and he could be the next Vin Diesel.

We now interrupt this tour to show you some of the night's pretty faces.

The last couple of guys are Serbian celebrities, Sergej Trifunovic (left) and Gordan Kicic (right). Sergej is a big-name movie star in Serbia, imagine Tom Cruise with a dash of Crispin Glover psychotic danger. Gordan sports a family tree of Yugoslav television and film royalty. And we totally believed everything they told us.

Walking south on 9th Avenue, we hold our hands over ears and don't even look at members-only Soho House and attempt entry into Spice Market (403 W. 13th Street @ 9th Ave.) with a throng of Eurotrash. We say "attempt entry" not because they are exclusive, but their walk-up front door area has to be the worst point of access constructed by total amuse-douchebags. (When leaving we literally jumped the railing and nearly damaged the family Thai jewels as it was too crowded to take the steps down.) But inside the Southeast Asia shrine we met some lovely ladies from Manchester who come to New York every year for Christmas shopping. They used to hit the clubs of Greenwich Village and go to blues joints like Village Vanguard but the Meatpacking District is currently "the place to be." I guess all of Europe is just now getting the memo.

Look! Up in the air! It's a bird, a plane, no it's Billy Crudup on top of the Hotel Gansevoort's (18 9th Ave @ 13th St.) rooftop pool yelling, "I AM A GOLDEN GOD!" Sorry, I'm really drunk at this point.

We swing past Pastis (9 9th Ave. @ Little W. 12th St.) — overhear the bouncer say to someone, "you just missed Ice T" — and take pictures of people getting their picture taken.

Heading west now on Little W. 12th St we make our final stop at Cielo (18 Little W. 12th St) which has apparently been nominated and won awards for interior design. We wouldn't know what, exactly, these awards were for; while we were able to jump the queue on our good looks and cred, we weren't about to pay $10 to experience beats that inspire "spiritual tranquility." Having had our share of the ghastly experience, we call it a night.

Word of caution: the cobbled roads, while aesthically charming, are not forgiving to the drunk and wobbly in heels.

Also: Night And The City [Jalopnik]