Monthly Archives: April 2013
“It was incredibly painful”
The headline was Amanda Knox’s reaction to Diane Sawyer of ABC News regarding the decision, made about a month ago, by the Supreme Court of Italy to annul her acquittal from back in 2011.
Today, Amanda Knox’s book and memoir, “Waiting to Be Heard,” will be released in bookstores. It will detail her four year struggle involving the discovery of the gruesome death of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, and the subsequent charges of murder against herself and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. This entry will not rehash the details of the trial or of the case, but instead contemplate how false and factually baseless accusations led to four years, or 1,400 days, of two people’s lives to be locked up and never given back.
Ever.
College lasts a duration of four years for most individuals, unless an advanced degree is being obtained. Reflect back upon the first moments you can recall of your freshman year in college. Young, anxious and naive. The partying, er studying, was about to commence. Now, fast forward in a blurry flash to the moment you are walking across a stage to receive your diploma. Between those two singular points, contrast the person you were going into the college experience to the person leaving. For most everybody, there are at least a few striking differences. Our looks probably changed, as did our perspectives to some degree. And all throughout, we had unprecedented freedom.
We could breathe.
It can be nearly impossible to imagine a world without freedom until it’s not there. Devastatingly, this was the new found reality for American Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. They were locked up in an Italian prison for four years. It’s a surreal amount of time, especially if you stop and think about it in terms of days, hours or minutes. Truly mind-numbing.
Focusing on Amanda, in four years, here are some of the things she missed:
A presidential election/first three years of a new term in office
Not knowing what an iPad is
Four Super Bowls/Washington Huskies football seasons
now on to more serious things…
A financial meltdown comparable to The Great Depression
College
Celebrating birthdays for members of her family and friends
Celebrating her own birthday with family and friends
Sleeping in a safe, comfortable bed
Being able to walk outside if the sun was shining
Going out with friends
Attending concerts
Only feeling anxiety from tests
Being a carefree twenty-something
Dating
Having the only crime against her being she was having too much fun before entering the “real world”
Smiling
Being happy
Not being perceived globally as a heartless murderer
Amanda Knox’s first on-camera interview with Diane Sawyer airs tonight on ABC at 10:00 p.m. Here are a few snippets from that interview released last night by ABC News.
Below are two photos of Amanda Knox. The first is from 2007 and the second is from 2013 during her television interview. It’s still difficult to comprehend how she had to change and grow up from being twenty years old to becoming a young adult while behind bars for a crime she didn’t commit, all while constantly asking herself a seemingly unanswerable question, “why is this happening to me?”
New York Daily News, 2007
Ida Mae Astute, ABC, 2013
In Italy, we all witnessed a judicial system that operated by the mantra, “guilty until proven innocent.”
The Italian Supreme Court had their time in front of the media. Now, five and a half years later, it’s Amanda’s turn.
Happy Monday!
On Monday mornings, we all feel a little bit of an exhausted letdown from the joys of the weekend. The primary conundrum for us all is trying to figure out how to inspire ourselves in a way that allows the carefree and anything-is-possible energy of Friday through Sunday to carry over into a positive force for the pending Monday through Friday grind.
Most of us start like this:
The goal is to get to this:
Make Today B-e-a-utiful!!
Have You Seen the LA Gear Nerf Guns!?
Like others, there are bands that I like that I’ve discovered well before they become widely known, “big” and/or mainstream and I take quite a bit of pride in this when it happens. It’s a special moment and is really cool when this occurs! Amusingly, the clip below illustrates the lengths some music fans will go to portray themselves as the most “in” of all those who are “in” when it comes to knowing the next “big band.”
It’s time for a “Lie Witness News” report!
As a nice, relaxing treat to ease you into the weekend, enjoy this funny bit from Jimmy Kimmel Live that contains interviews from fans from this year’s Coachella in the desert of Santa Barbara, California. It’s a gigantic musical festival that typically features a few massively popular bands and a long list of smaller indie groups, some on the cusp of making it to our radios, hearts and wallets.
That is, if they even exist…
The Best Grocery Store in History
Last Saturday afternoon, I watched a few episodes of, “The ’80s: The Decade That Made Us” on the National Geographic Channel. The hour-long episodes featured iconic images shown over a soundtrack unquestionably unique to the ’80s. This was a decade that the show, in a myriad of ways, proved was truly a definitive ten years in American history, especially relative to how we are living today.
Fast forward and this brings us to the ’90s, which was the first offspring of the aforementioned decade. There were many wonderful things to celebrate and cherish from the nineties. Nickelodeon was a great channel of original programming, with a line-up stacked with shows like, “Salute Your Shorts”, “Hey Dude”, “Legends of the Hidden Temple” and cartoons like “Doug” and “The Rugrats,” to only name a few. There were some of the best sports movies, like “The Mighty Ducks” (one and two) and the “The Little Giants.” There were some of the best major motion pictures, sitcoms, music, shoes that light up and so on and so on.
This entry could literally be a laundry list of treasured favorites, but it won’t.
One of the forgotten gems of this decade was the 1990 revival of the hit 1960s game show, “Supermarket Sweep.”
Remember…
They say history repeats itself. Hopefully, it does so in a supermarket filled with television cameras, an enthusiastic audience, six contestants, an energetic host with dynamite sweaters and $5,000!
Jimmy's Daily Planet 