Why are you here?

Mikey Lambe has moved to www.mikeylambe.com where today he is talking about Buddhism and Manure.

...The poet is talking about sadness and suffering and how they help us to grow and to find ourselves. The implication being, without any suffering we wouldn't be able to prove ourselves or find out what we are really capable of. We would never really grow up into real adult human beings. For that reason, all that pain and suffering and shit, it's all 肥料 he says. Now the kanji 肥 (hi) means to enrich, fatten, to make fertile and the kanji 料 (ryou) simply means stuff. What they mean together is manure! Here's my translation... LINK

Also today on Deep Kyoto he is introducing the Kyoto cafe/bar & knick-knack shop Smoke Room.

Why the name? Here’s the story as I understand it: the master here was formerly an antiques dealer, ordering a lot of goods from Europe, and one such item was the lovely frosted glass door now in the entrance. This originally belonged to an old 19th century smoking room in England, and thus Smoke Room. Originally Smoke Room was a zakka and antiques shop and there are still a variety of zakka type knick-knacks available here, but now Smoke Room is also a very pleasant cafe/bar. And the bar is well stocked... LINK

And his current fave on youtube is: