roundup of the last few days/weeks

• I was in the kitchen having an extended meditation on the use of the word "credibility" in international relations rhetoric -- thinking about Chomsky's observation that nations trying to maintain "credibility" act like mob bosses who rough up delinquent extortees as an example to others... then I came to the computer and found that my poly-amor Jaye had been reading an article called The Strange Credibility of Polyamory.
  
• Three seemingly unrelated mentions of "vampire" on three consecutive days: first Jaye said that someone she knows would look like a vampire if he shaved his facial hair; the next day, our friend L. compared our daughter Nyx's dress, with a large white collar, to a vampire's; on the third day I'm pretty sure I read about someone labeling someone else a "vampire" in some national-politics context.
  
• I was thinking about Teddy Roosevelt talking about his "bully pulpit" and Timothy Leary talking about how that usage of "bully" functioned on multiple levels simultaneously... then a few minutes later I looked at the front page of a newspaper in the grocery store and read about some U.S. financial expert lamenting that the U.S. was losing its ability to use the international dominance of the dollar and/or of U.S. financial institutions as bully pulpits in influencing the behavior of foreign parties.
  
• Nyx was walking with me through the grocery store and picked some goldfish crackers from a shelf and put them in our shopping basket. We bought them and ate them -- probably the first time in her life she had eaten goldfish crackers. Later that day, at my monthly in-person meeting for my work-at-home job, somebody ate goldfish crackers at the table in the meeting room, early in the meeting before anyone else brought food to the table.
  
• After drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee, I was imagining a scenario where I was getting hyperactive and telling people I was high on caffeine... within about a minute of that I clicked on an article link at news.google.com called "No love for the bailout: CNNMoney.com" and found a picture of a guy holding up a coffee cup with "THE BUZZ" as the name of the column.