In The Eco Gentleman's Shaving Kit: Back to Basics by Rob Knox at Greenopia, there is a reference to a shave brush made of cruelty-free badger hair, linked to a listing at drugstore.com for a shaving kit from Baxter of California, which listing describes the kit as Environmentally Friendly and Cruelty Free.

However, a Google search for cruelty free at baxterofcalifornia.com produces no hits, and Baxter's own description of their travel brush (in that kit), and that of their other shave brush simply don't report how the badger bristles are harvested. It is hardly plausible that Baxter of California would fail to mention that the badger were spared death or injury, as this would repel few-if-any customers, while attracting many of those who would otherwise purchase high-end synthetic brushes.

(Mr Knox also declares old [straight] razors from junk and antique shops are perfectly suitable once cleaned and sharpened, but this is only true in cases where the straight razors were of high quality before they got dirty and dull. There are plenty of new straight razors, such as those from Zeepk, which aren't suitable, because they are badly manufactured.)

A while back, I got an offer from Washington Mutual Savings Bank; if I started a free checking account with them, with a deposit of $100 or more, then after a few weeks they would add $75 to that. I decided to take advantage of that offer, and deposited exactly $100. I have kept my prior checking account, and left the WaMu account dormant.

Perhaps I should have waited. Yester-day (after the original offer expired), I received a similar offer from them, only now the supplement would be $100. Having taken advantage of the old offer, I'm blocked from exploiting the new offer.

As the Woman of Interest notes, this increase to $100 is suggestive of desperation.

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Last night, in CVS/pharmacy, I saw multi-packs of sparkling water on sale — regularly $3.99, now $3.97. That's a discount of just barely more than ½%.

I ordered a couple of harmonicas recently. I didn't and don't know the current location of the harmonica that I already had, and these were inexpensive. They arrived yester-day.

Anyway, one of them is an American Ace Harmonica. Really, they ought to give this thing a different name. There's nothing peculiarly American about its sound or operation; it's just an inexpensive but serviceable diatonic harmonica. (Which is all that I was seeking.) And Hohner has clearly printed the words made in China on the front label, right under The American Ace Harmonica, so the thing isn't even made in America. Calling it American doesn't do much beside persuading Canadians not to buy it, eh?

The other harmonica is a Kay Chicago Blues Harmonica, which I got for no better reason than that it had a clear Lucite comb, and that seemed like it would be cool. It too proves to be made in China. Perhaps the Chinese plan to attain a monopoly in the production of inexpensive harmonicas, and then some day pull the rug from under us, by suddenly embargoing them.

Well, to-day the new shower hose came apart as I was rinsing-off the stall with scalding water. A fitting involving a couple of pieces of metal (which would expand when heated) and a plastic tube (which would soften) came apart, and the hose came loose from the shower-head. Propelled by the water, the hose squirmed-about like a frightened snake.

This time it was my right foot that was scalded before I shut the valve, and that area of my thigh which was scalded last time seems to have taken a lesser hit this time.

I guess that my practice of cleaning the stall with scalding water needs to be changed or abandoned.

Some time within the next two weeks, I am going to shift this domain at its 'blog from one host to another. The move should be transparent to visitors. There is some chances that a comment might be lost, if it is made between the cloning of the underlying dB and the up-dating of DNS tables, though I will take measures to try to avoid such loss.

After a hugger-mugger of up-dates to my Linux installation, I found myself unable to access the Windows NTFS partition on my computer while running Linux.

I had been using the NTFS-3G driver to support such access. NTFS-3G, in turn, uses the fuse file-system API to support such access. Red Hat doesn't support fuse with their kernels, and I don't want to manually rebuild support for it, nor to wait on someone else to do so, whenever Red Hat releases a new kernel, so I support fuse by way of dkms. Thus, to access the Windows NTFS partition, I was using packages

• dkms-x.x.x.x-x.noarch.rpm
• fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm
• dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm
• fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm

Anyway, when I would try to mount the Windows NTFS partition, I would get a message that /lib/modules/2.6.18-xx.el5/extra/fuse.ko did not exist. There was actually a directory entry for it, but that entry was a redirection to a non-existent file.

As it turned-out, something had gone wrong with my up-dating from RHEL 5.2 to RHEL 5.3, and not only did I not have the most recent versions of the kernels installed, but there was a version mis-match between the kernel to which I was booting and the associated -devel[opment] package. dkms was thus unable to automatically rebuild the fuse file-system interface.

I installed the most recent versions of the kernel and their associated -devel packages, rebooted the system, uninstalled and then reïnstalled fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm, and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm. (I doubt that I needed to uninstall and reïnstall fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, but I didn't and don't want to bother puzzling that out.) I was then again able to access the Windows NTFS partition.

The night that Vons was screwing-up the delivery of food that the Woman of Interest had ordered on my behalf, I went to Ramesses, at 3882 4th Avenue in Hillcrest. I figured that I could get a whalloping amount of protein in a highly palatable form.

They gave me too much food. Really, they are very concerned to please their customers, so when I told them not to bother with the salad (I cannot readily digest lettuce), they gave me more rice. And they'd just dealt with an unanticipated surge of customers, so that Said (one of the proprietors and one of the chefs) needed time to get more rice cooked; to compensate for that delay (which really didn't bother me), he gave me some free lentil soup (which was excellent) and then a piece of some sweet baked good. They amount of food that I would have got without the extra rice, the soup, and the dessert would have been quite filling. When Carmen (the other proprietor, and Said's wife) offered me a second glass of ice tea, I had to turn it down, simply because there wasn't going to be room for it.

My understanding is that Ramesses is developing a growing local following. Well, they deserve it. And if they stay in business then I can keep eating there.

I eat at Ramesses fairly often. I always order the same thing. I suspect that there are other dishes that I would really like. but I so enjoy the dish that I first ordered there that I don't want to pass it up to try one of the other offerings.

My lack of posts here have been an artefact of my illness. I managed to comment here-and-there to various journals and 'blogs, but putting together an entry to my own 'blog has seemed too much. I'm considerably better now, though I'm still coughing and somewhat congested.

One of the aspects of my being ill has been that I don't have a clear sense of the timing of events over much of the last few weeks, even though I felt fairly lucid during most of that time.

On the worst day, whenever that was, I awoke as weak as a kitten — I had to lay down and rest after the effort of simply finding two matching socks in my laundry — but had to go out and get something for food energy. I managed to get to CVS/pharmacy (a half-block from my home) and got orange juice. After I drank it, I was very cold. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to reälize that I was cold because, on the one hand, I had just put about a pint of cold fluid in my body, and, on the other hand, was too low in energy to generate off-setting body heat. I just climbed under my bed-covers and passed-out. When I awoke, I was over-heated, and thought I'm like an old mouse, who has lost his ability to regulate his body temperature. But I was otherwise feeling much better; the carbohydrates and vitamins in the orange juice had been put to good use.

Later that day or some time on the next (I really don't remember), worried about me, the Woman of Interest placed an order for home delivery with Vons while I was asleep. This was probably a good idea, but in the event Vons quite dropped-the-ball. They originally gave her a two-hour window for expected delivery; at the end of that window, she got a call telling her that it would be another 20 minutes. She told them to telephone her if there were any problem. After instead about two more hours, figuring that local restaurants would soon close for the night, I went out. On my way, I let the Vons delivery man thorough a pedestrian gate to the apartment complex. When I got home, there was no food at my door; just a Sorry we missed you note. And, no, the delivery man hadn't called the Woman of Interest; as I noted to her, he didn't want to have to admit that the ostensible 20 minutes had been more like 120 minutes. (FWIW, I live less than half-a-mile from the nearest Vons store. As the Woman of Interest notes, they probably don't run the delivery service out of the nearest store, but it is none-the-less absurd that they cannot perform the equivalent of a half-mile delivery within two or even three hours.)

I don't know whether the flu that I had has resurged, or I contracted another while still weakened by the first. (Some years ago, I spent about half-a-year sick, a fair part of that with pneumonia, because I caught one flu after another, each before I'd fully recovered from the previous.) In any case, I'm back to being quite ill.

Before I came home and took various medications, I'd eaten a fairly large meal, and for whatever reason the food stayed in my stomach for hours. A problem with that was that the medication stayed there with it, instead of being absorbed by my digestive system.

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, and appears to be celebrating that release with, well, server dysfunction. The mailing lists are buzzing with anger over the slowness of the automatic up-dating routines. This morning, I spent several hours on a high-speed connection trying to down-load a disc image (and finally gave up). A few days ago I was being denied access to any downloads as if I had no active subscription. Their bugzilla tells me that my password has expired, but the link that they sent me to up-date it results in some sort of proxy error.

Barring some remarkable act of contrition on the part of Red Hat, I won't be buying any more subscriptions from them. I'll switch to something such as CentOS.