Light sources can be opaque and therefore cast shadows if there's a significantly brighter light source behind. Fire being a plasma, it's actually quite good at conducting electricity and therefore attenuating the light that tries to go through it: fire absorbs light. If it absorbs more than it emits, you'll see a shadow. It's basic radiative transfer. Let Lb be the background irradiance, Lf that of the fire and A the absorption coefficient of the flame; without flame you see Lb, with flame you see (1-A)Lb+Lf, which can be lower than Lb and therefore appear as a shadow.

Does "septième année" mean anything to a Canadian? Because I'm French and I have no clue what it means.

What? No. Hair, clothes, stone, dirt, pretty much everything is darker when wet. It's because of energy conservation. Wet things have a stronger specular reflection, therefore less diffuse reflection. In other words, instead of reflecting incoming light in every direction, it reflects it in a narrow angle, if you're not in that angle the object seems dark.

There are other factors here. 1: the feeling of being forced to give money. "I did something nice for you without your consent, now pay me". It's very awkward, if not rude. If you don't want to reward this kind of racket/blackmail, or if you can't give anything because you're short on cash, then the only vaguely polite way out is to not acknowledge the music and the musician. 2: it's awkward to stay and stare at someone who's struggling so much in life he has to perform in the metro; it's like you're taking advantage of this guy's misery somehow. Points 1 and 2 are somehow contradictory: the listener is exploiting and being exploited at the same time; social inequalities suck, you feel and think of that while listening to the music, it spoils everything.

What does it taste like? And if that doesn't matter, then don't call it cake.

There is. My father's bragging about me working for NASA and all but he doesn't even understand what I do there. That doesn't feel honest at all. I model electromagnetic interferences in coherent radiotelescopes, it's nothing huge, basic linear algebra. But ohhhhh, it's written NASA on my paycheck, better tell all the neighbors. Is like him to come pay me a visit once in a while instead. Then again no, I don't even care any longer.

Remove the apostrophe in every "it's". In a document written in a formal tone, all the grammatically correct uses of "it's" are already expanded into "it is" or "it has". The remaining "it's" are therefore wrong and should be replaced by "its".

Looks like a pinecone? Pineapple.