Rodger Swan was a popular American Youtuber who did videos about his life in Japan and also reviews of Japanese horror films. He passed away suddenly last week at the age of 23, of a disease called "acute pancreatitis". The video above was his final video. He was very passionate about his love of Japan and his life there. It makes me very sad to know that he is gone.
I hear many people talking about street art in Los Angeles, and the popular artists like shepard Fairey, Buff Monster and Kaws who started as grafitti artists and became more mainstream artists.
British artist Banksy is also very popular and you can see some of his paintings on LA buildings in the trendy Melrose area.
But i think the best Los Angeles street art is still not noticed and is hidden away in small neighborhoods.
Here the artist has combined many different worlds....showing Pooh, Elmo and Sponge Bob living together in peace. Eeyore is holding a sausage on a string.... What is the meaning?
Here Mickey Mouse ( a popular American mouse) has been made to be a more chubby mouse to fit in with the modern American diet. If you look at the larger photo, you can find that Mickey has now only one arm.... mouse's life is not easy.
Most pelicans live on the beach, or on small rocky islands, but many pelicans have also become adjusted to life in the big city. This is Wendy. She is a modern pelican.
Wendy works at a large finance firm and doesn't have a long enough lunch hour to go out and hunt for fish, so she usually goes to the drive thru at KFC.
When not working, Wendy writes about life on her blog Urbanpelican.com
SKU is a Los Angeles food and Whiskey blogger that I met through youtube. He does blogs about restaurants and food in LA and every Wednesday he writes about whiskey. Sku is a food explorer and he drives all over to find new places to eat. Yesterday, he took me to a place called the San Gabriel Valley. It's about 15 miles east of LA and has a very big population of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants. There are thousands of Chinese restaurants everywhere. Sku took me to a very nice dimsum (ヤムチャ）restaurant called King Hua.
The dimsum was very yummy and I am a little sad that I am not eating it right now. They also have lots of sea animals in tanks. You get to choose which animal you want to eat and they take it out for you.
I only ate three of these shrimps, but I named them all.
From left to right, they are. Tabitha, Jacob, Shintaroo, Junpei, Mia, Eric, Toby, Nathaniel, Naomi, Leah, Carl Jr, Steve, Ichiro, Kenta, Nokko, Bruce, Perry, Jonathan, Linda, Pedro, Mandy and Candy (twins), Penelope, Todd, Yurie, Yuki, Jean Bobo, Pierre, Fatima, Gogo, Bobo, Jojo, Momo, Mimi, Mokomoko, Yokopoko, Macchupicchu, Chappuchappu, and Jim.
I think it's nice to be able to make friends with an abalone before you eat him. Shown here is Bobby.
This duck is very tasty, but you don't get to choose him. Maybe it's hard to keep a lot of ducks in the middle of a big city. I would have like to have met this duck before I tasted him.
This friendly clam is called mirugai in Japanese. In America he is called a Geo Duck. I try to explain that he is not a duck, but nobody listens. He is very sweet, crunchy and tasty. I like to eat him raw or cooked in butter and garlics. His foot looks like an elephant's trunk but it tastes very different(and less tough).
These are called chicken knuckles. They are fried pieces of chicken's cartilage. I'm not sure where chicken's have knuckles, but I'm glad they do. I have one wish to ask all the chickens of the world, and this is it "Keep on being tasty. "
You can meet sku on youtube where he does videos about whiskey. If you want to know what the difference is between bourbon, scotch, Tennessee whiskey and rye, his videos can help you. I joined him in this one where he talks about Japanese whiskey.
The biggest storm in five years is hitting Los Angeles. Today slushy hail fell down and it looked like snow. It almost reminded me of being home in Shimane with snowy winters.
Lots of rain means lots of days inside so I have been cooking. I went to the rainy farmers market and bought some turnips. I roasted them in the oven with olive oil until they got soft and shriveled and looked like a baby bears toes. It can be dangerous to eat real baby bear toes because the mother can get aggressive, so this is a safer way and you don't have to hike around looking for the bear.
The radishes came with big green leaves stuck to them. I cut of the leaves and cooked them with garlic and a potato. Then I put them in a blender with some dashi and made a very green soup.
Yesterday I made one of my favorite things. Tarako spaghetti. Tarako is the eggs of a cod fish. You can buy egg sacks at a Japanese supermarket. Then all you have to do is take the eggs out of the sack and cook them in butter till they turn pale colored. Then you mix in some spaghetti and stir it. You can put a little nori on top. It's so easy and full of yum.
You can see some video of Tarako spaghetti in Tokyo at the end of the video below, and also yummy Kobe beef in Kobe.
On my recent trip to Hawaii I saw and ate many nice things. I ate some of the things I saw, but not most of them.
One of my favorite things about Hawaii is Fish. At the FoodLand store on Kapahulu and Kapiolani Blvd you can get many kinds of fresh fish that is very cheap. I got Ono, Ahi, Opah, Shark, and some other kinds for just a few dollars. I cooked them with shoyu (soy sauce) and garlic and ate them over rice every day. The tuna belly shown in this video was TORO fatty tuna. I ate it as sashimi and it tasted like eating a beautiful underwater dream where happy fish float into your mouth and stomach. If you buy this amount of toro at MItsuwa or Marukai in Los Angeles, it will cost $15-20.
I was sad to learn about the problem of canine alcoholism in Japan. Some dogs get depressed and restless from island life and they become abusers of American lite beers. I have tasted the beer this dog is drinking. It's called "Coors LIte". I'm pretty sure that the company designs the taste to appeal to dogs.
Giovanni's shrimp truck is the name of the truck shown at the end of the video. It's a famous shrimp truck in the town of Haleiwa in the North Shore of Oahu. You can get shrimp in butter and garlic, lemon butter, or spicy. I hope that when I die, I don't find out that God is a vengeful salt water shrimp.
I have many videos about Hawaii. Here are some of the most popular ones.
Thank you all for voting for my video "I am Robot". The video (shown above) won the 2009 Youtube Japan awards for its category. You can seeall the winners here at my friend Hikosaemon's blog.
I am very excited because I will be getting a youtube trophy. I already have a pair of youtube socks, so they will go nicely with my trophy.
I want to say thanks to everybody who took the time to vote for my video. It was very kind of you.
I got hungry earlier today and decided to get some friend chicken at the nearest KFC.
But, this West Los Angeles Kentucky Fried Chicken has been turned into a different kind of KFC. It's called Kind For Cures and is now a medical marijuana dispensary. I stopped by hoping to get some ordinary KFC fried chicken, but I noticed that the smell of the smoke coming out of this KFC didn't smell very chickeny.
When I asked the shop keeper if they still served fried chicken he said "We only have nuggets now".
The Los Angeles city government is trying to limit these medical marijuana dispensaries because some of them are located near churches (including this KFC) and schools. This KFC may be gone soon. I think they are going to move into an old Chick-Fil-A shop next.
AFter you watch this video, you will understand what I meant in yesterday's blog post when I talked about trying to make a video after having an eye exam. My pupils were dilated from the eye drops and I didn't want it to look like I had been eating some special chickens while making this video.
Today I had an eye exam at the optometrist for my first time. A very nice woman put special eye drops in my eyes to make them dilate so that she could make sure I didn't have any diseases. Now my pupils have become dinosaur sized and they are very sensitive to light. I think I understand why the dinosaurs died out, because it hurts to have pupils this big. The sun has always been my good friend, but now he is hurting me.
Luckily, they gave me special glasses to wear outside in order to protect my dinosaur pupils. I have seen old people wearing these before but I never knew what they were. I feel very fashionable.
I haven't made a video for my helpmefindparents channel lately, so after my trip to the eye doctor I tried to make a video outside. It was so bright that it was very hard for me. When I got home to edit the video it I looked very funny. I was squinting my eyes so tight and when you could see them, my pupils were so big that it made me look like I was on some kind of drug. I guess I will have to reshoot the video tomorrow.
It has been 7 hours and I still have Brontosaurus pupils....I wish the rest of me was a Brontosaurus too.
It's January and all over the streets of Los Angeles you can find Christmas Tree Graveyards.
It is very similar to the era of the black plague in England when there were so many victims that families piled up the bodies of their dead outside, with no proper burial. It also looks similar to the toilet garden I blogged about last month.
It makes me sad to see these trees abandoned in a pile, but it is nice that they have each other.
I am trying to make my blog more of a news/journalism blog so I decided to try to interview one of the trees in this pile. This is the first interview ever on my blog. I hope you enjoy it.
Ken: Hello
Tree: No Response
Ken: How are you today?
Tree: No Response
Ken: I am doing well, thank you. I was wondering how it makes you feel to be thrown outside after Christmas ends?
Tree: No Response
Ken: If it makes you sad, you can just say "Yes" , if you are very happy and so are all your friends, then you can just be silent.
Tree: No Response (I am very happy and so are all my friends)
Ken: I'm so glad to hear that. I am happy too.
Well, I guess it was silly of me to feel bad for these Christmas trees, it turns out that they are all very happy.
I hope you are having a happy new year too, and so are all the Christmas trees in your life.
For the past few days there has been a high surf advisory and the waves have been very big in Los Angeles. Most spots were 5-7 feet but today was a very big day and one of my favorite spots, El Porto, had 10-15 foot waves. There were even some 20 foot waves breaking outside according to the surfer with the broken board in this video. Someday I would like to ride waves that big, but I would like to ride on top of a dolphin instead of a surf board....or maybe a whale shark.
You can see another video of high surf at El Porto last year at the same time. Both videos are taken at El Segundo Jetty. This year is much bigger.
My friend Gary "The Gooch" Musgrave is an illustrator who makes very handsome drawings. Today, he gave me this nice drawing of a friendly Sea Cow as a New Year present.
The gooch, gives me lots of art advice and also showed me how to silk screen along with silks creener Mr. Jordan Crane.
Here are some of my favorite Gooch works. You can see more of his drawings at http://www.gogooch.com
Lately I have been talking a lot about dolphins surfing. Surfing is a great way to meet dolphins because many of them are also surfers. Dolphins are very friendly and curious people.
Yesterday there was a large swell of 5-7 foot waves hitting the Ventura area. I watched the surf from the beach and saw a dolphin surfing. Usually you can just see their fins popping out of the wave, but this dolphin was different. He kept jumping out of the water as he rode the wave, and there was a human surfer right next to him, just a few feet away. They rode the wave together for quite a while. I had never seen a dolphin jump while riding the wave, I think this dolphin must be a pro-surfer. There were camera men on the beach with big, fancy cameras. Maybe the dolphin was there doing a photo shoot for Surfer magazine.
The above pic was taken on my iphone, so I couldn't zoom and I only have this bad photo. You can see a person surfing next to the white water, to the left of him is a horizontal shape, that is the dolphin. I wish I had my video camera. I paddled out right after taking this and I saw the same dolphin on a wave right in front of me. He was very large, and he almost jumped right over me. I was scared that he would hit me when he landed. It would be a lot of dolphin to be hit with. I was worried he might be mad at me for eating some of his friends before. Sorry, dolphin.
The creator of Gumby, Art Clokey, died today in Los Osos, California.
I was very sad to hear about this because Gumby and Pokey have been good friends of mine since I was in junior high. A neighbor of mine had a tape of old gumby shows with subtitles and we watched them after school sometimes.
Gumby was made in the 50's with very simple stop motion animation. They take a picture of Gumby in one position and then move him a little and take another picture.
I like a lot of modern animated shows, but I also miss the simple beauty and happiness of the Gumby style. I think that sometimes a simple stop action animation has more character and personality than the modern polished style.
I want to say thank you to Mr. Clokey for making my friends Gumby and Pokey.
I spent the first days of 2010 in a place called Big Sur. Big Sur is a coast and forest area between Los Angeles and San Francisco and it's full of happy animals. The first animals I met were a group of grey whales who, like me, were also passing through Big Sur. They were pretty far away, but I could see them blowing whale water high up into the air, and I saw a baby whale jump out of the water. I'm not sure what his name was because he was so far away.
While I was watching the whales, a man next to me said he had seen a California Condor . It's the largest and rarest bird in America and it only eats dead things. I mostly only eat dead things as well, so I think we would have a lot in common.I didn't get to see the condor though, because it had already gone into the trees. It probably had some work to do.
I also saw sea lions, otters, dolphins and homo sapiens.
In the south part of Big Sur is a surf beach called Sand Dollar. I paddled into the waves as the sun was setting. The waves were not so big, 3 or 4 feet, but they were very powerful. The current was pushing me toward a rocky area, so I caught a wave to try to get out of the rocks. I surfed the wave for a few seconds and then turned into it to let it break over my head. I do this a lot with the gentle waves in Los Angeles, and the wave always gives me a friendly pat on the back and head. When the Big Sur wave hit my back it felt like Ichiro Suzuki had whacked me with a baseball bat. I lost my breath for a second and my body felt all stiff. I'm not sure what I did, but I must have made the ocean very angry for the wave to hit me so hard. I want to apologize to the Sand Dollar beach for whatever I did to make it so mad at me. Please forgive me.
Last year, Remi and I made part 3 of "How to speak fluent Japanese without (hardly) saying a word." The topic was abbreviations and we showed many abbreviations of popular restaurants. Starbucks =Sutaba Family Mart =Famima Mister Donuts =Misudo And First Kitchen = Fuakin. Here is the video.
Many viewers thought that this was a joke. I guess the abbreviation for First Kitchen sounds similar to an English word with a different meaning. Many people believed that we had just made up the abbreviation Fuakin. But Remi-chan and I are very serious about teaching the world how to speak fluent Japanese and we would never try to teach something that was not true.
Recently, another youtuber named Thatjapanesegirl made this video. She talked to people in Osaka on the street and asked them to abbreviate First Kitchen. Hopefully, this video will help people understand that this is not a joke. If you haven't yet, I hope you can all enjoy Fuakin sometime soon.
I just got back from boogie boarding 10-12 foot+ waves in the city of Ventura. It's about one hour north of Los Angeles. People call these waves "double over head". I have surfed double-baby overhead before, which is about 2 babies high, so I thought I could handle these, but when I got there, I saw that the waves were too big for me to surf, so I brought out my boogie board and flippers. It was very rough, and hard to paddle out to the waves. When I finally got there, my breath was very heavy and the waves looked like giant apartment buildings coming at me. Just as I was thinking about what kind of fish and creatures live in these liquid apartment buildings, I saw two dolphins surfing on a 10 foot wave. I wrote an earlier blog post about seeing dolphins surf. I really wanted to catch the wave with these dolphins, so I turned around and paddled, but I missed it. I didn't see the dolphins again. I guess they rode that wave in to the beach and went home.
It was pretty scary to be out in these big waves and paddle over them. At first, I was scared of them, but then a giant one broke right in front of me. I was in the worst place to be. It was a lot of water. I took a big breath and dove under the wave and waited to be thrown around by the ocean and held under, but Mr. Ocean only shook me a little bit for a few seconds and then popped me out onto the surface. That was very kind of him.
I caught a nice 10 foot wave, and rode it all the way to the beach. At the end of my ride, it broke in a hollow tube, and I popped out of it. When I grow up, I want to be a wave just like that one, or a fire truck.
Merry Chirstmas, everybody. I hope you are enjoying some fried chicken and Christmas Cake with your family.
I spent part of Christmas Eve drawing lions. What if you were born a king but that isn't what you wanted? What if you had to live your entire life doing a king's job, like hunting for foxes and other kingly things? It would be sad to have to live a life like that. I hope this lion's wish comes true on Christmas.
I wanted to draw this lion on two different types of paper to compare the difference. I used mostly the same colors of acrylic ink to paint him. The lion on the left (lefty) is painted on cold press water color paper, and the lion on the right (Jean-Bobo) is painted on Rives Print Making Paper. The water color paper doesn't absorb as much so the colors might seem brighter. The print making paper gives the lion a different texture.
I decided to frame Lefty the Lion, and here is how he looks. Jean-Bobo says he prefers to live outside of a frame. Lefty the Lion will be a Christmas present for a good friend I have met here in America.
In our new video, Remi and I teach you how to speak fluent japanese by speaking English. People often say that Japanese is the easiest language in the world to learn. It's true, by following this video and our other series, How to Speak Fluent Japanese Without Saying a Word, anybody can learn to speak Japanese. My friend even taught a very small donkey to speak Japanese using our videos.
I hope you learn a lot from this one.
Merry Chirstmas everybody and happy everything.
Ken Tanaka will love you even more in 2010. I promise.
