Comments

  1. Sean Boyd says

    @2 silentbob,

    No, we didn’t. We weren’t old enough in 1979 to have picked that up on the news (or if we did, certainly didn’t remember it.) Ironic, since we lived in Southern California at the time. And while we’ve heard of The Boomtown Rats, we’d never heard the song before, so we naturally couldn’t make a connection to an event we’d never heard of.

  2. Silentbob says

    Well, let me just pontificate for a little bit, and say that the point of this Boomtown Rats song, was the inexplicability of mass shootings. In this case, when a reporter asked the killer why she had done it, the reply was, “I don’t like Mondays”. Obviously absurd, but the songwriters took that as emblematic of all spree shootings.

    There is never any good reason. So you’ll never get a better one than, “I don’t like Mondays”. The chorus goes:

    They can see no reasons
    ‘Cause there are no reasons
    What reason do you need?

    Sad that in the intervening forty years, this song has only become more relevant, eh?

  3. blf says

    The mildly deranged penguin would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of her custom calendar service. Want a longer February? Quite easily done. More Thursdays in every week? A triviality. More hours in some days? Easy. …To be decided the day after? A small retroadjuster can be fitted. Weeks without Mondays are quite popular, as are longer weekends and lunch-times, albeit the best-seller is solar eclipse every day.

    For an extra fee, she’ll convince the rest of the world to use your customized calendar. Some alterations to the planet’s orbit, spin, and/or fundamental physics may be required. Does not contain nuts.

  4. A. Noyd says

    Last year, Wednesday was my day of misery. This year, all the days of misery are showing up at random.

    The last two days have been pure chaos because of a heat wave making it impossible to practice for the sports festival in the afternoon, which means we have to move practice to the morning. Today we somehow lost fourth period completely and gained a seventh period, which was actually the scheduled third period. I don’t even know.

    Then there was a bonus moment of chaos when the fire alarm started stuttering on and off. All the teachers were preparing to bust into the school kitchen with a fire hose and some extinguishers when the school nutritionist poked her head out to announce there was no fire, and she didn’t know WTF was going on either.

  5. Acolyte of Sagan says

    Silentbob, #9; the song, written by Bob Geldof, was explicitly about that single mass-shooting. Every verse references only that shooting. The ‘they’ in the chorus you quoted are the parents of the shooter, and the other two choruses say that ‘he’ can see no reason, the first being her father and the second the police captain.
    Rather an odd choice of song for a teacher to use, methinks.