Classical Busker, Orange Croc, and Cloudy September

I was walking around in the Gaslamp Quarter area in Downtown San Diego a couple of weekends ago when I spotted a street busker playing something street buskers just don't play in this part of the world -- classical music!

Naturally I stopped to have a listen... along with a few other fascinated folks who weren't in a hurry to get anywhere just then. To be honest, his playing is nothing special; technically far from proficient and transmitting nothing more than a string of notes. But really, who the heck plays Vivaldi or Bach out on the streets of San Diego, California anyhow? (The music captured in this clip, though, were Corigliano's The Red Violin and the 3rd movement from Vivaldi's A minor violin concerto) The dude may not be able to enliven the music very well, but he was daring enough to go about playing the decidedly unpopular genre in public. I admire that!

On another note, I ran into this rather amusing news section today:

It makes me nostalgic for my college days in the Midwest. We had a patient came in looking quite as orange as that croc does once... from drinking nearly a gallon of carrot and tomato juice everyday. Apparently some idiot alternative-medicine quack had told him that that would cure his severe myopia (he was so nearsighted his eye glasses' lenses looked like they were made from the bottom of vodka bottles). He didn't see any better after a month of drinking only carrot and tomato juice in place of water, but it sure was easier to spot him in any crowded room. He was so orange he nearly glowed in the dark! Luckily xanthodermia from excessive intake of carotene and lycopene (the things that give carrots and tomatoes their orange/red pigmentation) is quite harmless and naturally reverses itself after a while once you've stopped stealing carrots from your pet bunnies. 

It was gloriously gray along the Del Mar shore last week

September is on its way out of town and we have been enjoying some gorgeously cloudy and gray days along the coast (I don't live anywhere near the coast, though my a-bit-out-of-town job is). I don't really know why, but I like overcast and foggy weather... Maybe not being to clearly see things has a lot to do with it. To me it sort of facilitates pensiveness... not having to focus on anything in particular makes it easy for me to lapse into my own jumble of thoughts, and sometimes that even leads to coherence writing! Not that you would find any of that here, mind. It's late in the afternoon and I'm still trying to make sense out of my latest meeting with the Mormon sisters (they had shuffled them up again, steady Sister Stetig had gone off somewhere else and now I must come up with another fitting pseudonym for the newcomer). My head hurts just thinking about it...