First of all, we owe profound thanks and probably some sort of Wookie Life Debt to Mark Poutenis over at Thinking Ape Blues for his timeless artistic rendering of Frederick, Newton, and the dastardly Dali. Give it a look! It's the sort of thing that makes our lonely, ridiculously unlucrative lifestyle entirely worthwhile.

I had initially thought about having John T. Scopes in the jail scene here, but that would have involved fudging the dates by about ten years, and while I am entirely willing to represent Dali as an alligator-commanding former accountant prodigy, those ten years would have haunted me to my grave.

So, we get the next best thing to Scopes, namely the ghost of Eugene Debs. Debs was the Socialist Party candidate in four elections stretching from 1904 to 1920, but never managed more than 6% of the vote. The Ur-Nader, if you will. He was thrown into jail in 1918 under the Espionage Act for speaking out against World War I and was not released until 1921. Clarence Darrow had some nice things to say about him in his autobiography:

" There may have lived some time, some where, a kindlier, gentler, more generous man than Eugene V. Debs, but I have never known him... I never followed him politically. I never could believe that man was so constructed as to make Socialism possible; but I watched him and his cause with great interest. He was not only all that I have said, but he was the bravest man I ever knew. He never felt fear."

- Count Dolby von Luckner

Why indeed, Dolly? Why indeed?