Suppressing banner on interactive startup?

[Tim Chase]

A couple of hopefully short (interrelated) questions:

1) is there a way to suppress the banner when starting Python 
interactively?  Something like a "--quiet" that would just drop 
you straight to a prompt?  I like to use Python as a 
nuclear-powered calculator, and am working on a couple little 
projects where it would be quite handy to suppress the banner 
version/help information (namely, if it gets piped to a 
text-to-speech front end, the less noise the better)

2) is there a way to change the two prompts from ">>>" and "..." 
to other options?  Namely, again with the TTS option, something 
that is more TTS friendly than hearing "greater-than greater-than 
greater-than".  The "dot dot dot" isn't nearly as bad.

I'm not sure what sorts of queries to google for to find this 
out.  I've tried things like

site:python.org changing interactive interpreter prompt -idle

and

site:python.org suppress start-up banner
site:python.org banner interactive

along with a few such variants, and had no results that seemed to 
be what I wanted.

Short of editing CPython source, is there something I've 
overlooked?  Some command-line option that doesn't get listed in 
"python -h" or an environment variable?

Thanks,

-tkc