As the great Elvis Costello said, "Yesterday's news is tomorrow's fish and chip paper." How true, how true. I watched Barack Obama's speech less than a week ago now, and it already feels like years, what with all the Sarah Palin news and so on. I'm not a big fan of political speeches; they don't tell me much about the candidate other than that s/he speaks or doesn't speak well. But since Obama speaks well, and since I want nothing more than an Obama victory (that and a lot of paperback sales of MATRIMONY), I was happy he did a good job, though being a novelist and easily distractable, I kept thinking about things not directly related to the speech itself, such as, Has he really memorized the whole thing? He doesn't appear to be looking at the teleprompter. Or will they keep panning the camera on his two cute daughters until, inevitably, one of them will get caught picking her nose, which is what would happen with my two young daughters in the outrageous and implausible circumstance that I was the Democratic nominee, if my wife and I could even get them to sit still for that long.