I flew to Los Angeles yesterday for today’s meeting with a potential client. It was an unbelievably uneventful trip—one of the best since the security changes took effect after September 11. Last night we had dinner at an odd little Thai restaurant called Toi, on Sunset Boulevard. The place is decorated with rock and roll posters, they play good old-fashioned rock and roll music at a reasonable volume, and the food is quite good. Today we finished our meeting at about 11:30 and headed to the wharf in Redondo Beach, where we had lunch at a Korean restaurant. Fish soup is … different. Walking around the wharf, I ran across a pearl shop where for $9 I got to pick out an oyster. They sliced it open, got the pearl (a nice sized black pearl), and then mounted it on the setting of my choice. The setting, of course, was an additional cost. This probably has been going on for some time, but it’s the first I’d heard of it. It makes me wonder, though, if I can get a nice pearl like that for $9, why pearls cost so much in jewelry stores.