Everyone in business has had the customer from Hell. Often, the employees get stuck dealing with them, while the owners or managers see only the revenue. There are time when a customer is so demanding, so expensive, that the only choice is to cut them loose and let them haunt someone else. It turns out that Panera Bread is one of those customers.  So much so their ad agency gave up the account saying “no amount of money is worth it.”

Panera Bread Co.’s lead ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt, has resigned its account after two years with Panera, saying it was “much too much even in this crazy business.”

An internal memo issued this morning by Chicago-based Cramer-Krasselt Chairman and CEO Peter Krivkovich and obtained by Advertising Age portrays a relationship between the agency and Panera that was fraught with tension.

The memo cites as reasons for ending the relationship the “constant last-minute shifts in direction, the behind-the-scenes politics, the enormous level of subjectivity that disregards proof of performance.”

Cramer-Krasselt said that “in the end, no amount of money makes it worthwhile.” However, the memo added that the agency still believes that Panera Bread is a “wonderful brand” that delivers on its food sourcing and quality promises.

“Many of us will continue to eat there. Because it’s that good,” the memo said. “But enough is enough.”

My goodness. I did not think it was possible to offend the sensibilities of ad men.

I’ve run into companies like this. They make it so hard to do business with them you eventually walk away from the account. I’ve never actually fired a customer, but I have systematically ignored them so they will go away on their own. Another trick is to raise rates so high they go looking for some other source. If they stay around you at least have the margin to make the account profitable. Sometimes, you just have to fire the customer, as there is no way to make it work.

I love the British press. So much so I get most of my news about the world from them, rather than American sources. What does it for me is the irreverence. Reading the New York Times or Washington Post, I get the feeling the writer filed his report while dismantling a bomb. There’s not much in the way of humor in our reporting. The Brits, on the other hand, will gladly mix tabloid nonsense with serious news on the same page or even the same article. They make the news fun.

This weird little story in the Independent is a great example of the devil may care habits of the British press.

The ‘consciously uncoupled’ star revealed that she follows the work of Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, whose experiments attempt to investigate whether human consciousness has a direct effect on the molecular structure of water.

His theories go as far as to claim that shouting at rice – as one so frequently does – could turn it bad.

This is comedy gold, but it would never appear in an American paper. Our press cozies up to the powerful and famous. The Brits lampoon the rich and famous.

“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter,” Paltrow wrote in a blog post for her much derided clean living website GOOP.

“I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”

Handing over the keyboard to friend Dr Habib Sadeghi to explain what on earth she was talking about, he wrote: “Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990s.

GOOP?  Sure enough, it is a real site. I thought maybe it was an acronym for some British slang. She apparently runs or is the owner of an on-line boutique. Gwyneth Paltrow is a famous person.  Her wiki page says she is “an American actress, singer, and food writer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991.” I thought she was an actress, but I have no recollection of seeing her in any roles. It gets even more weird when you look at her bio.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late film producer/director Bruce Paltrow. Her father was Jewish and her mother is from a Christian background, and Paltrow was raised with “both Jewish and Christian holidays”. Her father’s Ashkenazi family immigrated from Belarusand Poland, while her mother’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch (German) and white Barbadian (English). Paltrow’s paternal great-great-grandfather, whose surname was “Paltrowicz,” was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Her uncle is opera singer and actor Harry Danner.

I’m going to assume that a woman who thinks you can hurt the feeling of water is very far to the left in her politics. I don’t know enough about her to say for sure, but that would be my guess. Yet, her very carefully constructed wiki page is heavy on the race stuff. There’s some heavy duty signaling going on there. Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.

“In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘Fear’. After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallised under the microscope: It yielded grey, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals.

“In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like ‘I love you’ or ‘Peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals.”

Her insightful post comes just a week after she compared dealing with internet trolls to being a survivor of war.

Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Code technology conference in California last Tuesday (27 May), she said: “You come across [comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanising thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanising thing, and then something is defined out of it.”

“My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience,” she concluded.

Assuming Gwyneth Paltrow believes these things she is reported to have said, the women is as dumb as a post. Then again, she has become famous pretending to be other people, so maybe this is just another act. In a world where everything is fake and cheesy, pretending to be a celebrity airhead could be the way smart people get rich in the entertainment business.

This story in The Week is a writers dream. Anytime you get to write the word “penis” in a non-medical way you’re going to have a good time writing the story. When the reason to write the word “penis” is because the subject of your story is someone who collected penises, it’s like hitting the lottery. Everyone suddenly has penis envy.

“It’s my morning ritual,” says the collector. “I get a cup of coffee and open up eBay and Etsy. I’ve bought two or three penises before most people’s alarm clocks have gone off.”

The collector, who wishes not to reveal his name, lives in an $850-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side — the same place he’s resided since 1977. The spacious, railroad-style abode has seen its fair share of collections come and go over the past 24 years. First, he collected various versions of the five of spades, from playing card decks. Then, it was misters — anything to do with the word “mister,” be it Coffee, Clean or T. There was also the series of devils and a collection of Nancy comic strip paraphernalia — that androgynous, hollow-eyed, Brillo-haired girl made famous by Ernie Bushmiller. But in the end, one collection stood high above the rest: penises.

Lost in all the penis talk is the fact that this guy is paying $850 a month for an apartment in Manhattan. The average rental is $3800 a month right now. In most cities in America, a sump is going to cost at least a grand a month. Most likely this guy was grandfathered in under rent control or some similar scheme.

There are well over a thousand pieces of penis-related art in his home, and yes, the collection is growing on a daily basis.

Upon entering the apartment, the first penis you will most likely notice is a winged phallus hanging from the entrance to the living room. After that, your eyes may settle upon the upward curve of a bronze coat hanger, the drawing of a little boy peeing into Humpty Dumpty’s mouth, or the statue of David above a toilet. The collector’s apartment is a cacophony of cocks. A deluge of dicks. A plethora of penii.

Standing 6’2″ with snow-white hair, the collector, age 58, admits that even he has to be careful not to hit his head on some of the low-hanging fruit when moving about his apartment.

“You should see the faces on the delivery guys when they come up. I open the door to get my food, and they get a glimpse inside. Dicks everywhere! You can see their eyes widen, and then they always take this tiny step backwards. I live for the day when a hapless religious proselytizer makes the mistake of knocking on my door.”

Alas, the rest of us will most likely not have a chance to see the apartment. The collector chose to remain anonymous for this article not because he is embarrassed of the sexual content of his collection (“I have no shame, and I love the shock effect,” he says), but because he would like to avoid having random people tracking him down for a viewing.

“I like that it’s a private collection. It’s just for the people I choose,” he says. “I can’t help it. I’m an elitist.”

Back in 1977, the collector was a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll party animal who hung out at music and dance club icons like Danceteria, The Mudd Club, and CBGBs. These days, he’s more of a homebody with 25 years of sobriety and an extensive collection of independent films.

Although he makes a good living, most of his money goes to his collection. As such, he sometimes has trouble making ends meet. He supplements his day job as a concierge in the Garment Center, which he’s held for more than two decades, by working “mad hours of overtime” running a freight elevator.

This is why the power centers of the Empire are nothing like America. In the hinterlands, a concierge lives in a small apartment on the seedy side of town, not in a tony apartment building with members of the elite. He’s not building a collection of dicks and getting written up by some hipster snob either. The lands of our rulers are nothing like where the rest of us live.

This story about world drunkenness is interesting. Immigrant countries don’t tell us a whole lot with a survey like this, but the old world offers some useful insights. Those screaming about scientific racism love talking about this sort of stuff, never understanding that it undermines their charges, making them look foolish. You can’t explain a map like this with culture alone. It gets worse when those ethnic patters hold for people in North America. From the article:

Britons over the age of 15 on average drink 11.6 litres of pure alcohol a year, according to the “Global status report on alcohol and health 2014”.

The report provides country profiles for alcohol consumption in the 194 WHO member states, looking at the resulting impact on public health and policy responses.

And it reveals that the harmful use of alcohol causes 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide.

Europe is the region with the highest consumption of alcohol per person, making up the entire top 10.

Belarus takes the top spot, with people on average drinking 17.5 litres of pure alcohol a year, followed by the Republic of Moldova where the figure is 16.8 litres.

Australia and Canada also have high levels of alcohol consumption, with people on average drinking 12.2 and 10.2 litres a year respectively.

In the United States the figure is marginally lower at 9.2 litres.

But in northern Africa and the Middle East, the average figure is less than 2.5 litres of alcohol per person, with many countries having figures below one litre.

When analyzing the stand-off with Russia over Ukraine, it may be useful to remember this map. There are many difference between east and West and they don’t stop at the neck line or the bar bill. Russia is not Western, but it is not Asian either. It is the great transition and that shapes the Russian worldview. They look at Ukraine in a very different way that the sorts of people infesting the State Department.

I’m a healthy sort. I don’t go crazy about it, but I try to eat a balanced diet, exercise and so forth. As such, I keep track of my calories. The thing about calorie counting is it does not work. Calories counts on food are estimates and no one really knows how accurate they are or even if they are close. McDonalds, for example, claims a Big Mac is 550 calories, which is probably pretty close, given the swarm of lawyers circling major corporations looking for a reason to sue, but you can’t be sure.

That’s why you should avoid eating junk food. As a treat on occasion, it is fine. Life is for living and all that, but moderation is the key. The same is true of chains that laughably claim they are better than fast food. In most cases, the chains are relying on weird chemicals, lots of slat and fat to make their food taste good. They can’t afford to hire chefs, so they hire chemists to make their standardized menu taste good to the broad public. This story in Vox is a good example.

The ranges on menu items are so vast that, depending on what your order looks like, a burrito could have 350 or 970 calories – nearly a threefold difference. (Never mind that it is nearly impossible to order the lowest-calorie Chipotle burrito, which consists of a flour tortilla with beans.)

This is a problem that lots of fast food chains are confronting now that the health care law requires them to post calorie counts on their menus. At establishments where menu items are highly customizable, places like Chipotle or Dominos, coming up with accurate calorie counts is a vexingly difficult tax.

Chipotle has settled on providing consumers with a calorie range that is, well, quite large. And when consumers see that range, a new study in the Journal of Public Health Nutrition finds, they underestimate the calories in their own burrito by 21 percent.

For starters, Chipotle is just a sit down Taco Bell. Pretty much the same stuff. Taco Bell is honest about what their doing, while Chipotle is not. Both sell highly processed food loaded with salt and fat. If you are trying to lose weight or you are on a special diet, STAY OUT OF CHIPOTLE!. No one cares more about your health than you, so if you need a special diet, make it yourself. Otherwise, you get what you deserve.

This is better than when eaters don’t have any calorie information at all. In that scenario, researchers found that eaters underestimated the calories in their burrito by a full third.

But there’s a small tweak that can make Chipotle’s calorie labels even more effective: adding examples of how many calories are in the burritos used as the end points of calorie range. This is what that looks like, spelled out (the calorie ranges Chipotle uses appears to have dropped slightly downward since this study was conducted and when I picked up a menu today).

There’s zero evidence that this will make any difference in the real world, other than to drive up the price of food and give lawyers a new avenue to suck blood from the economy. It is the fundamental nature of the totalitarian mind to see the state as an all consuming organism, of which you are just a part. The state must care and provide for you in the same way the body provides nourishment to the cells and organs.

The Obamacare requirement to post calorie labels, however, favors the range approach. In regulations published in 2011, the Food and Drug Administration directed restaurants to publish a range from the lowest calorie version of an item to the highest. But it doesn’t say anything about including examples of what’s included at each end.

“Critics of calorie-count regulations are correct to point out that we cannot justify the costs of such requirements if the mandated information does not improve consumer understanding,” study co-authors Peter Ubel and Peggy Liu write at the Monkey Cage Blog. “The FDA should require restaurants to define the endpoints of calorie ranges. Consumers deserve comprehensible information about their food choices.”

It is ironic that the Nazis were nuts about diet and exercise and our alleged anti-fascists are similarly nuts about your diet and exercise. That’s the nature of totalitarianism. The king just wants his taxes. He leaves your soul to the church. The totalitarian demands your soul and your sword, in addition to your property. That gives him license to boss you around about your diet. After all, you are responsible to the state and the state is responsible to you, like a violent mother hen.