Term-limited governors do the strangest things: New Mexico has abolished the death penalty.

The pink-eye patrol is off to Albuquerque to spread our disease throughout the American Southwest, so blogging will be noticeably irregular for the rest of the week. While we're out there, I'll also be delivering a paper at the PCA conference on science fiction and the environment, which I'll try and blog something about in the next few days.

Have fun y'all.

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...

Above is a chart from Chris Bowers by way of Matt Yglesias charting the comparative advantages of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore over the course of the campaign season. This is an important charts for Democrats who are about to be confronted with something that has long seemed impossible: not just a victory but what looks to be a blowout. For the last fifty days of election 2004, we were never ahead, according to the polls—we just thought we were, having mystified the polls and made faulty assumptions about turnout and the undecided break.

Obama's situation is quite different, with a nine-point lead in the final NBC/WSJ poll and between nine and eleven points in Gallup. Those numbers would have McCain underperforming Dukakis, and if you believe in Nate Silver's cellphone effect, the margin could be even larger. This same movement is reflected in the tracking polls—despite persistent claims that "the polls are narrowing," there's no real evidence of this.

And Obama has already locked down good margins in the early vote, to all appearances: over 2.5 million people have already voted in North Carolina, including almost half of the state's African-American population and 44% of registered Democrats. In Colorado and New Mexico in particular, the margins may already be too great to overcome.

What I'm saying is, though there's still work to be done, this time I really think we actually win.

CNN's John King says the McCain camp has given up on Colorado alongside Iowa and New Mexico.

They are now finishing with a very risky strategy. Win Florida... Win Nevada, that is a state that is now critical to the McCain math even though it is only five electoral votes. And here is the biggest risk of all: they say yes, they have to win North Carolina, yes, they have to win Ohio, yes, they have to win Virginia— trailing or dead even in all those states right now—but they are betting, Wolf, on coming back and taking the state of Pennsylvania. It has become the critical state now in the McCain electoral scenario, and they are down 10, 12, even 14 points in some polls there...

I hate to give free advice to McCain, but this is lunatic. The RCP average for Pennsylvania is +11.7 Obama. Pollster.com has it at 15.2%. Nate Silver puts McCain's numbers in PA at 2%.

How bad are McCain's internals in Colorado, if he thinks he has a better chance in PA? He has no chance in PA.

FYI: if he does win PA, I will personally burn both Neil and Srinivas in effigy. Sujata too.

UPDATE: Nick at Cogitamus points at one thing that distinguishes Pennsylvania from other potential McCain last-chances: no early voting.

Presumably this has something to do with information based on Colorado's early vote totals; the McCain campaign must believe that they can't achieve a large enough Election Day victory to offset Obama's advantage in early voting.

Of course, Pennsylvania—Pittsbugh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle, in Carville's famous phrase—is also more ripe than Colorado for racially coded campaigning, as Shankar points out in the comments.

Miners in New Mexico have discovered a huge crystal formation underneath the Chihuahuan Desert that bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman's Fortress of Solitude. (via grinding.be)