That Civil Rights crusader Martin Luthor King Jr. was killed by an assassin's bullet on this day in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, is a fact no one disputes. What is disputed is who pulled the trigger.

James Earl Ray, a career criminal, pleaded guilty to the crime and accepted a sentence of life imprisonment rather than face a jury trial with the death penalty on the line. Three days later, Ray recanted his admission and would maintain for the rest of his life that he hadn't been the trigger man. King's wife and children sided with Ray, blaming MLK's death on a criminal conspiracy reaching from the Mafia all the way to the top of the United States government.

Was Ray guilty? Did someone else shoot the gun that killed MLK? The only way to know the truth might be to go back in time and take a look for ourselves.

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Americans across the country will be watching today's solar eclipse. They say that the path of this eclipse is a once in a lifetime event. That descriptor wouldn't mean so much if you were a time traveler like Booster Gold.

Enjoy the eclipse, everybody!

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No band has been as universally celebrated as the Beatles, but they haven't been without controversy. Their original cover for Yesterday and Today, released in 1966, stirred up so much trouble, you'd think that had posed with the severed head of a sitting United States President.

Amazingly, the Fab Four didn't learn their lesson from that brouhaha. One year latter, they would again step into trouble with their initial draft of the album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released 50 years ago yesterday.

The Grammy-winning album cover included of images of people who had inspired the Beatles, including Sonny Liston, Shirley Temple, Lenny Bruce, Shirley Temple, Karl Marx, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple. (The Beatles really, really liked Shirley Temple.) But not everyone made the final cut. As People magazine reported yesterday:

"One of them wanted money for it," [Paul McCartney] continued.

"We just wrote to everyone and said, 'Do you mind?' Well, at first we didn't. But the head of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood came to my house and complained! He said, 'This is going to be a nightmare. There are going to be legal battles!' I said, 'No, no, no. People are gonna love it! They're all on the Beatles cover, you know! It'll be a laugh, they'll understand.' He said, 'No, you've got to write to them all.'"

"So we did. We got a letter out: 'We are planning to do this using your image. Do you mind? Is it okay? Please give us the okay.' And all of them did, except for one ... who wanted to cut a deal," he explained. "And we thought, 'You know what, we've got enough people on here!'"

Who was the celebrity who wanted to get paid for the Beatles to use his likeness? Would you believe it was a profit-minded time traveler?

The album was eventually released without Booster Gold's image. Despite the omission, the album still sold pretty well — about two and a half million copies in 1967 alone. Compare that to 2016's best-selling album, Adele's 25, which moved a half million fewer copies. In fact, Sgt. Pepper's was outperformed in 1967 by More of The Monkees.

Perhaps if the Beatles hadn't been so greedy and had stuck with their original impulse to go Gold, their album might have survived as more than a footnote in history.

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Until 1933, the term of the President of the United States began on March 4. This created a long delay between the election, held in November, and the incoming government's ability to take action. The 20th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed in order to reduce this lame duck period during which the country was effectively ungoverned.

The first president to be inaugurated on the newly mandated date of January 20 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated to his second term on January 20, 1937, eighty years ago today.

Inauguration Day 1937 saw a record 1.77 inches of rain fall in 37° weather in Washington DC. Fun! Newspaper reports of the day say that crowds didn't linger long after FDR's public swearing in on the Capitol steps, and who can blame them? I'm sure most of them didn't have an impenetrable 25th-century force field to keep them dry.

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Gone with the Wind was a huge smash hit in 1939. Adjusting for inflation, it's still the biggest blockbuster of all time — by 200 million dollars! Isn't it ironic that a movie sympathetic to the antebellum South would be the catalyst for the first African-American to win an Academy Award on February 29, 1940?

Back then, the Academy Awards still tended to reward movies that people had actually seen in theaters. The financial success of Gone with the Wind carried over into eight Oscar wins, including Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the movie's delightful "Mammy."

There's a long-standing, unsubstantiated rumor that Mexican actor Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez was the model for the now-familiar Oscar award first introduced in 1929. However, you can't help but notice the similarity between the famous golden statuette and a certain, golden time-traveler ("The Greatest Model You've Never Heard Of").

Given how much attention has been given lately to the Academy's preference for lily-white talent, ask yourself which is more far-fetched: that the Academy Award of Merit was modeled on a white time-traveler or that it was based on a Mexican? You be the judge.

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