February means Valentine's Day and Valentines mean love therefore this column is just brimming with the stuff.

My first shout-out: Johnny Cash.

I've been reading Robert Hilburn's excellent bio on the Man In Black, Johnny Cash – The Life, and I must say I am struck by two things.

One, how hard 1930s Great Depression life was in rural Arkansas. Cash's family was completely the Tom Joad experience but without the Okie western exodus. Cash's farmer father was past desperation, his family virtually destitute when FDR's administration came to the rescue with 20-acre plots for farmers willing to pay them back.

Cash wasn't expected to pick cotton ‘til he was six. But by four he was hauling water out to his family as they did. There they joined together in singing gospel songs. Indeed, by the age of three he already had mastered his first, I Am Bound for the Promised Land.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When Thailand's popular, anti-government graffiti
artist Headache Stencil wrote racist rants about Chinese infected with
the coronavirus, many of his Thai and foreign fans were shocked,
outraged, and disgusted.

"Hey Chink! Please go back to ur shit-eating country. Our government
need ur money to keep their power but you all not welcome for us now.
#notwelcometothailand #backtourchinklandpls," wrote @headachestencil
on his Twitter site on January 26, which had more than 6,000
followers.

The English-language slur against Chinese is not common in Thailand,
so the artist apparently wanted foreigners to also see his post.

Headache Stencil often tweets several times a day but mostly in Thai language.

Starting in 2018, he gained wide support and pride of place in some of
Bangkok's edgy art galleries when he illustrated Bangkok's dilapidated
streets with wall graffiti showing a large clock, politicians' faces,
and other satirical imagery.

During that year, one of his graffiti targets was coup-installed

Let’s talk about strains. The word strain has many meanings: there are musical strains, muscular strains, and, yes, marijuana strains. The latter is what one looks for when purchasing cannabis from a dispensary.

Granted, in simpler times, all that mattered was 1.) the baggie held an ounce (the metal meter on the hanging scale read “1”), 2.) no stems, no seeds (Acapulco Gold is … ), and 3. It got ya high. As the plant has grown more well known, simplicity seems quaint. To purchase intelligently and learn which plant properties alleviate aches, pains, nausea, seizures, stressors, tremors and traumas, familiarity with various forms and components of cannabis becomes essential. Strains categorize these components and forms add flexibility to how they are consumed.

Charles Kenny’s book, Close the Pentagon, has an endorsement from Steven Pinker despite wanting to close something that Pinker rarely acknowledges exists.

This is a book to answer the question: What if someone who believed that war was only committed by poor, dark, distant people, and had therefore almost vanished from the earth, were to encounter the U.S. military and the U.S. military budget?

The answer is basically a proposal to move the money from militarism to human and environmental needs — and who doesn’t want to do that?

And if people who think war is almost gone and disappearing on its own can nonetheless be motivated to help end war-making by what they consider a bit player and what Dr. King correctly labeled the greatest purveyor of violence on earth, so much the better!

But a strategy to make it happen is going to need to be in greater contact with the real world than is a book that contains words like these: “If the U.S. wants to reduce the number of civil wars and their resulting spillovers . . . .”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Public anger is increasing against Thailand's
military-backed government for its handling of Wuhan's deadly
coronavirus, because Bangkok's toll is among the biggest number of
infected people outside China.

"The country is now in the stage of disease transmission," said
Disease Control Department director-general Dr. Tanarak Plipat in a
warning for tourists and others.

"Since they are staying in places full of foreign visitors, tourists
are likely to be in areas of disease transmission."

As for "the degree of risk concerning the disease in Thailand, chances
of contraction remain low in this country," Dr. Tanarak said.

Twenty-five people in Bangkok had confirmed virus infections as of
February 6, the Health Ministry said.

Twenty-one of them, including a Thai woman, arrived in Bangkok from
Wuhan, the city in China believed to be the source of the outbreak of
the mysterious disease.

No coronavirus deaths were reported in Thailand, and some quarantined
victims recovered and were released.