Beware of the Hidden Iman Apparently...

An interesting read of an article about current Iranian president Ahmadinejad and why he is more of a threat than we believe in our secular-based world.

Part of the article posted HERE at Daily Mail (UK) states...

As one Iranian exile told me yesterday: 'The trouble with you secular people is that you don't realise how firmly Ahmadinejad believes - literally - in things like the winged horse. By choosing this date for his decision, he is telling his followers that he is going to obey his religious duty.

'And he believes that his religious duty is to create chaos and bloodshed in the "infidel" world, in order to hasten the return of the Mahdi - the Hidden Imam. So don't expect him to behave, in your eyes, "reasonably".'

So who is this Hidden Imam? He was a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed who, at the age of five, disappeared down a well around AD940. He will only return after a period of utter chaos and bloodshed, whereupon peace, justice and Islam will reign worldwide.

Never thought I should be afraid of a Hidden Iman, but I guess so. We, as citizens in this country, need to understand our potential enemies much better than we currently do. How can we make intelligent decisions if we don't understand the driving forces behind other countries decisions, such as religion, economics, internal politics?

I find it interesting that the countries Bush labelled years ago (and was heavily criticized) as part of the Axis of Evil; North Korea, Iran and Syria seem to be living up to their billing.

Politically, we long for leadership with the strength of Roosevelt or Churchill, but in today's environment we would never support anyone who would state such strong opinions. The idea that everyone has to like us is an insane political position. They should leave us alone and try not to kill us. If they do that while hating us, I'm okay with it.

Redemption

Vampire movies have always bothered me because they never take into account basic Judeo-Christian belief systems. They conveniently ignore basic tenents, like we are either "for God or against God" and, instead, focus on the benefits of being immortal as a blood sucking murderer.

So, in May of 2001 I wrote a screenplay called Redemption to address my personal concerns. The story synopsis is as follows: in a moment of weakness, a deeply religious scientist becomes a vampire in a failed attempt to save his family. Now forever in the grips of evil, he spends eternity seeking redemption by ridding the world of all vampires... including himself.

Out of the fourteen or so screenplays I've written, this has always been my wife's favorite. That surprised me because, for me, it didn't seem that special, so I put it away and have worked on numerous screenplays since (The Box, Graverobbers Wanted adaptation, Severed). However, when I started putting together my plans for Sonlight Pictures, a Christian film company, Redemption, a horror flick, was always one of the four films that I included in the initial projects (Severed [action], The Flu [comedy], The Adventures of Gabby Wells [children]).

My film nut daughter, who's a big fan of Severed, asked about Redemption, so we dusted off the five year old screenplay and gave it a spin, sitting in our movie room and read the script aloud. To both of our surprises the script was very good. I mean, really, really good. Sure, it needs some work, but it rocks... and I don't say that lightly as I am my own, harshest critic. My daughter liked is so much that she was pretty adamant that Redemption should be the first Sonlight Picture, not Severed, as was planned.

She may be right. So, my To Do List has changed a bit. I'll finish the current re-write I'm doing with Severed, then clean up Redemption a bit to see if I can make the script any better.

In any event, rediscovering something I had written so long ago was a lot of fun. It was like reading something I didn't even write and finding it very enjoyable... kinda like discovering you're good at something by accident.
I guess I should trust my wife's judgement more now... great, she'll just love that. :)

Not Up To Code

Our house was owned previously by the engineer for the city of Safety Harbor. Because of that, nothing in our house is standard... everything is the result of leftovers from a job site. Whenever my wife and I do work in the house we find our house to be more and more "unique."

Doors aren't standard size.

The air conditioning thermostat was non-standard.

The windows were non-standard.

The lighting fixtures were non-standard.

And so on...

One of the on-going struggles in our house has been the inconsistency of temperature from our air conditioning system. The front of the house would be hot, the back of the house would be cold, etc. We finally decided to get the system looked at and found that the air handler was... that's right... non-standard. The return air system was completely screwed up. So, we've hired a company to fix it all up and, as they were moving the air handler out to the garage so they could set it up correctly, they said that the way it was originally put in was not even up to code.

No surprise here.

The upside is that we should have a level temperature household. The downside is that they didn't finish their work in one day so we had to sleep in a 90+ degree house last night. Well, we tried to sleep. No one really slept well.

Ahh, the joys of home ownership.