I've been listening to Scot Turner's Spirit of Radio Sunday on 102.1 the Edge and it's great. Earlier today, they played I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats, a song that references a telex machine.
If you're my age or younger, you've likely never seen a telex machine. A telex machine is a printer that receives and prints text messages in the pre-fax era. In January of 1979, Bob Geldof read a telex report at Georgia State University's campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California. Her reason for killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer? She didn't like Mondays.
The story struck such a chord with Bob Geldof that he wrote I Don't Like Mondays and included this lyric that ensures every generation will ask the question "what's a telex machine?"
The Telex machine is kept so clean
And it types to a waiting world
