Allow me to share a little interesting tidbit from my day. Nothing terribly profound, but it may be interesting to those of you with a fascination for the morbid.
Lately, I have been listening to Tori Amos' album, "Strange Little Girls", which features a song called "I don't like Mondays". I never really looked into who wrote the original, but today I found out that it was Bob Geldof, who was first known to me as the actor who played Pink in Pink Floyd's the Wall.
It was while listening to NPR on my way to teach chess at an elementary school in Redmond, that a rebroadcast of a report of the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting was played. Today just happened to be the 30th anniversary of a massacre perpetrated by 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer. The school was across the street from Spencer's house, from which she fired the shots. She used a rifle that she had recently been given for Christmas by her father.
The next event will tie this all together. During the shooting, a San Diego Tribune journalist, Steven Weegan, looked in the phone book to see if he could find the closest house and maybe get an interview with an eyewitness. He dialed the number and a young girl answered the phone. When he asker her where she thought the shooting was coming from she gave her address and told him she was the one doing the shooting. Weegan began asking her questions and when he asked the obvious question, "Why?"
She responded with "I dont like Monday's, do you like Monday's?"
Geldof was in Georgia at the time and saw the report come over the Telex machine. What stuck in his mind was the four word response. He went to his hotel room and wrote a song that eventually hit number 1 in the UK.
