Unlike some other bloggers, Howard Bashman of How Appealing knows how to credit a songwriter.

We always thought the song Howard quotes from today, "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats (old Bob Geldorf band) was the best rebuttal to those who said that the juvenile rage and school violence associated with Columbine, Paducah and Jonesboro were either new phenomena or the result of a sudden increase in the availability of guns. The song was a hit in the early 1980's. You can listen to it here.

"The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload.
And nobody's gonna go to school today,
She's going to make them stay at home.
And daddy doesn't understand it,
He always said she was as good as gold.
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?

Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
I want to shoot
The whole day down.

The telex machine is kept so clean
As it types to a waiting world.
And mother feels so shocked,
Father's world is rocked,
And their thoughts turn to
Their own little girl.
Sweet 16 ain't so peachy keen,
No, it ain't so neat to admit defeat.
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?....

All the playing's stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys a while.
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die.
And then the bullhorn crackles,
And the captain crackles,
With the problems and the how's and why's.
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die?"

Back to song credits....TalkLeft has had a line from a Bob Dylan song as our "motto" since the day we started blogging (see bottom left column of main page)--we not only credit Dylan but link to the lyrics. In case there was any doubt as to what our position would be on the issue of she who failed to credit Jackson Browne, now you know.

Update: This just in from Reuters on an interview with Michael Carneal, the teenage "shooter" in the Paducah, Kentucky case.

"People want one simple answer I can't give it," he told The Courier-Journal of Louisville in an interview at the Kentucky State Reformatory, where he is serving a life sentence."

"Back then, Carneal said, he believed his parents didn't love him, and that he was constantly taunted by other students, including some who he said falsely claimed he was gay."

"One thing that did not influence him, he said, is video games or violent movies."