Obama picks Jeff Bridges

I'm as dismissive of the presidential campaign as you are (at least until they actually start debating), but I have decided who I'm going to vote for. I base this not on the fact that one guy is sane and the other insane, but that one guy chose Jeff Bridges when asked for his favorite movie president. From a Q&A with Entertainment Weekly:

Who's your favorite movie or TV president?
You know who was a great movie president? Jeff Bridges in the Contender. That was a great movie president. He was charming and essentially an honorable person, but there was a rogue about him. The way he would order sandwiches — he was good at that.

That is the correct answer, senator. You have my vote. McCain picked Dennis Haysbert from "24," which is a copout on several levels.

'He's a treacherous ... yeasty ... codpiece.'

CHICAGO -- Went to the downtown AMC today to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End with the brothers, and who should be coming down the escalator as we go up? Barack Obama. In a White Sox cap. Without entourage or fanfare and without being noticed. He seemed to be with two guys, who kinda looked like security men in plainclothes. Was Barack moviegoing solo? Wonder what he saw. Didn't think to ask. Maybe Pirates.

Which was great, by the way. Close to perfect. A return to the grandness of the first one, even though I was never sure what was going on. But the Bloom-Knightley romance is resolved brilliantly and Geoffrey Rush is a treasure. What I have appreciated most about this trilogy is its celebration of language. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have a field day with the florid discourse of piracy, spinning screenplays that are at once showy and elegant -- a tapestry of delicious verbiage. This is how blockbusters should be: sensational both in production and in writing. Here's a sample of words, phrases and sentences that I was compelled to scribble down during At World's End:

"Feculent maggots." "Divulgatory." "If I may lend a machete to your intellectual thicket..." "Our destinies have been entwined but never joined." "Utterly deceptive twaddlestick." And there's so much more. Maybe Barack should hire Elliott and Rossio as speechwriters. He'd be guaranteed the nomination if he referred to an opponent as a "treacherous ... yeasty ... codpiece."