Last night I watched a moving and exceptionally well made film, Paradise Now. It’s the story of two young Palestinian men who are chosen to carry out a suicide bombing against Israel. The film does a reasonably good job of showing arguments both for and against armed resistance while giving us a unique view into the lives and struggles of the Palestinian people.

The movie also gives a rarely seen view into how Hamas and other organizations recruit, organize and carry out such missions. One striking part of the operation involves an Israeli helping to smuggle the young Palestinians into Israel. I was shocked to realize this, but even in polarized conflicts there are those who are willing to help the other side in exchange for money. The film has a great ending that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the second the credits roll. I won’t ruin it, but this film is worth checking out.

Oh, and a surprise treat on the DVD was a trailer for Everything is Illuminated, which looks pretty good. It was a Warner Independent picture that not surprisingly didn’t get much promotion or distribution.

Back when I used to own a TV and one of the best commercial zapping DVRs around, I would record Frontline eposides on PBS. I usually would save them until I was feeling intellectual enough to watch. I would then be thankful for forcing myself to watching something intellectually stimulating as this is one of the best shows on TV.

Now that I don’t have a TV, I remembered, thanks to a recent WSJ article on good video watching on the web, that PBS lets you watch many of the Frontline episodes online for free.

While creating this blog, I couldn’t help but wonder what impact this would have on my name presence in search engines. Currently, my site www.blakeperdue.com ranks 1st on Google, 7th on Yahoo and somewhere in the ether on MSN for the keywords “Blake Perdue.” My LinkedIn profile, which I created less than a year ago, outranks my site on both Yahoo and MSN despite my site having been around for 8 or 9 years.

Perhaps it’s because my site has been mostly Flash in the past. Still, I include search engine friendly pages and tags to make sure they can read my site and determine what it contains. I think this blog will help boost my ranking on Yahoo and MSN, and to help it along I’ve peppered this blog with the keywords “Blake Perdue” — hence, the alt text on the nav saying “Blake Perdue blog archive”, etc. This should do the trick, but only time will tell.