Once I asked a seventeen-year-old singer something that wasn't on the list, which caused her manager to pipe up: That wasn't what we agreed on. She doesn't have to answer that.

Though thou deseruest hardly at my hands, Yet neuer shall these lips bewray thy life.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun our gradual descent into the Indianapolis area, a descent similar in many ways to the gradual slide of the United States from a first-class world leader to an aggressive, third-rate debtor nation of overweight slobs, undereducated slob children and aimless elderly people who can't afford to buy medicine. The current conditions in Indianapolis: Temperature sixty-one degrees, partly cloudy skies, winds from the southwest and intense Midwestern boredom.

There were thirty-odd people in the room.