Gumby's dad, Art Clokey died today at age 88



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.

Big Sur




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.

First Kitchen is Fuakin.

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.

12 foot waves and the surfing dolphins of Ventura

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.