Personalized bobbleheads are sooooooo 2001. If you really want to be hip, you’ll want to order your own personalized doll.

Well, it’s more like a personalized figurine, I guess. They’re made out of PVC clay and don’t seem to have articulated limbs in the photos, so they’re going to be hard and immovable like a figurine. They come in three types: a “cute” type, a “vivid” type and a “fixed” type. The difference seems to be on how customized you want the figure. The “fixed” figure is just your head on a stock body, while the “vivid” figure is 100% custom based on a full-figure photo you provide.

Of course, if you had different ideas about just what a “personal doll” should be, you might need to look elsewhere.

Poor Beauty the Bald Eagle…the top of her beak was severely damaged by a shotgun blast from a hunter, leaving her unable to eat prey. She was found in 2005 and turned over to a bird recovery center in Anchorage, Alaska, then eventually to a center in Idaho called Birds Of Prey Northwest that specializes in raptor birds. Without a beak to tear her food with, Beauty must be hand-fed strips of meat and has difficulty drinking and preening. The linked article says that the director of the center met a mechanical engineer, who, moved by the bird’s plight, has offered to design a prosthetic beak made out of nylon composite material. The prosthetic, which will be glued onto the remnants of her upper beak, would allow her to eat more normally, but would not restore her to a point where she could be released to fend for herself in the wild. More pictures of Beauty and other raptors being cared for by the center here.

If you read nothing else I’ve linked here today, go and read this post at The Progressive Review by its editor, Sam Smith.

Smith details how the “arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs” have managed to spread the pernicious nothingness of mass capitalism into every avenue of American life over the past quarter-century.

The tragedy is that each of the infected cultures, organizations and individuals once had their own culture that often was infinitely more appealing, intelligent, inspiriting and honest than that which has sullied it. Why is the corporate and business school tradition preferable to that of the church, the artist, the non-profit, the political movement or education? Is politics just branding, is art just a product, is education just a learning process, would Martin Luther King have done better if he had gone to business rather than theological school? Each of these traditions have centuries of wisdom and experience behind them, but all that is increasingly put aside to fit the corporate model.

We pay for this in numerous ways. Some are obvious such as political candidates and public officials carefully avoiding real issues in favor of creating artificial images of themselves, backed by such words as “hope” and “change.” And if you don’t join with the change huckster, you are accused of “fear of change.”

A few years back I put it this way: “A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.” And this was all before the rise of the killer hedge fund.

It is tempting just to copy-paste the whole post right here, but I will limit myself to those two pull quotes. This is not a “things were better in the good old days” rant by a jaded ex-hippie; this, my friends, is the straight and unvarnished truth. Our fascination with “red vs blue”, “black vs white”, “Coke vs Pepsi”, whatever is strictly for show, keeping us distracted while the legions of lawyers and regiments of MBAs systematically gut everything we cherish, reduce it to “product”, then discard it when the product is no longer sufficiently profitable. The very world itself is now reduced to an item of consumption which has been overexploited so badly that we may cause our own extinction.