Monday, Monday.

* The Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket is out tomorrow. Here's the Amazon link.

* Nate Silver projects Al Franken will win by 27 votes.

* The World's Best Colleges and Universities. Duke clocks in at #13, but more important, longtime domestic loser Case Western (#90) beats Tufts (#156) in the far more important world rankings, finally giving Neil the humiliation he deserves.

* Amanda Marcotte had the bright idea of reading Mad Men alongside some of the literary texts it makes allusions to, most notably the Frank O'Hara poem that bookends the season, "Meditations in an Emergency."

* Longtime reader Eli Glasner has a great new film blog.

* 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss stories. Thanks, Lindsay!

* "Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture." Via Neilalien.

* A school in New York has already been renamed for Barack Obama. Students initiated the renaming.

* The things you learn from Poli-Sci-Fi Radio: Val Kilmer is mulling a run for governor of New Mexico. Kilmer's only the second-worst Batman, but the one I think I'd want least in elected office.

* Top 25 Comic Book Battles. #1: Batman vs. Superman from The Dark Knight Returns.

* Heroes creator Tim Kring has apologized for calling his fans dipshits. Remember, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth...

Physicist Ronald Mallett wants to build a time machine.

Mallet's proposal seems innocuous enough: He's currently designing a table-top experiment using a ring of high-powered lasers. The idea is that light carries energy, and, as Einstein showed, energy is equivalent to mass - therefore beams of light can distort spacetime, just as large masses do. (The warping of spacetime by large masses was the prediction that made Einstein famous; the idea was confirmed when starlight was seen to be displaced by our sun during a solar eclipse in 1919.)

Inside Mallett's circle of laser beams, empty space would become "twisted" in much the same way that milk in a coffee cup begins to swirl when the coffee is stirred. If the beams of light are intense enough, the warping of space and time close to the beams could be severe enough to create a "loop" in time, Mallett says.

But don't buy a gun to shoot your granddaddy just yet.

Mallett's work has brought mixed reactions. The head of his department at the University of Connecticut, William Stwalley, told New Scientist that although he was intrigued by the challenges of the experimental design, making any sort of time machine "seems like a distant improbability." Two physicists at Tufts University, meanwhile, recently wrote a critique of Mallett's theory, suggesting that any closed timelike curves he creates would need to be bigger "than the radius of the visible universe."