Quote for the Day

“I don’t like Mondays.”

Long before Columbine, Brenda Spencer carried out a school shooting that inspired a well known song.

On January 29, 1979, 16 year old Brenda Spencer fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer lived in a house across the street from the school and showed no remorse for her crime. Tried as an adult, Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and was given an indefinite sentence. She is currently in prison.

A reporter got through to Spencer after the shooting while she was still in the house. The reporter asked Spencer why she carried out the shooting. She answered: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.”

Bob Geldorf wrote “I Don’t Like Mondays” a month later, commenting:

I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta . . . there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload'. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, 'Tell me why?' It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn't an attempt to exploit tragedy.