The color red is one that the cone cells in our eyes tend to be particularly sensitive to. This drawing is incredibly crude, and is drawn from fifteen-year-old memories, but it conveys the basic idea:



The red cones in the eye tend to respond more strongly than the other cones; and the green and blue cones tend to respond weakly even to light we would call red. So red is an attention grabber.

Now this is hardly news. Stop signs and stop lights are red for a reason, after all. Yellow pages sellers have long used red accents as an attention grabber. I've long noticed that when I drive red cars (which seem to have been around half the cars I've ever owned), people don't pull out in front of me as often, like they notice me more easily in the red car. (Now the deer, on the other hand, seem to be color blind.) And the auto industry has settled on red as the color for tail lights, and bright red as the color for brake lights, so that other drivers will notice the cars ahead of them and not run into them.

Not that that's news; but it's rather shocking to see the magnitude of this effect.

On an average week day, this blog receives around 70 unique visits. On a weekend day, it's around 50. And among those visits, by far the most common topics that bring visitors are:

• Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API. That post receives from five to ten visits every single day. This problem is affecting a lot of people. Microsoft, are you listening?


• People searching for pictures of NASA spacecraft, particularly from the Apollo era.


• People searching for information on Gateway Tablet PCs.


• People searching for UML info.


• People searching for .NET programming info.


• People searching for pictures of actors. And boy, are they disappointed when they find that page! But that may be the single most common search item that brings people to my site.

So this is a low-traffic site. By contrast, Dean Esmay's site gets about 30,000 visitors per day. I'm definitely small potatoes compared to Dean.

On Wednesday, Dean linked to this post under the title "Little Mosque on the Prairie". Dean's World is a bit of a hot spot on the topic of Islam and how it's perceived vs. how it is. Opinions there differ pretty strongly. That should be a place where a link on this subject should draw some attention.

On Wednesday, my site had around 120 visitors, or around 50 more than usual; and on Thursday, my site had around 100 visitors, or around 30 more than usual. Some number of people have followed links from Dean's World since then. Let's call it around 100 visitors from the Dean's World link.

On Friday, Dean linked to this post under the title "Booth Babes".

And by 6:30 a.m. Friday, my site had received 55 visits for the day, most through Dean's link. By the end of the day, I had received 350 visitors, or 280 more than my average. By the end of Saturday, I had received 120 visits, or 70 more than my average for a weekend day. Midway through today, I've already received 50 visits (my usual Sunday average), and 22 of those were to that post. So that's around 370 visitors for that topic, vs. 100 for "Little Mosque on the Prairie".

So maybe Sharp had a point in using their Booth Babes. It still seems like a wrong approach to me, distracting from the incredibly large TV image. Some have suggested that the ladies are useful for framing the image in photographs, providing a sense of scale. That's true enough for the photos. Maybe the ladies were mostly there for that purpose. But that's for photographs. On the show floor itself, the TV should have sold itself.

As one commenter at Dean's said, the ladies should've been on the TV for maximum attention.

It caught my eye with a commercial. I had been watching a CBC interview show that promised an interview with Alan Rickman. I've been a fan since Die Hard; and just that day, I had watched the last half of the most excellent Something the Lord Made. So I watched Canadian TV, something I don't normally do.

And at the commercial break, I noticed curling, that curious sport that involves sliding a stone across the ice and sweeping a path to smooth it along. I've never understood the sport, but I always found it interesting to watch. So the commercial started with a quintessentially Canadian scene: a curling stone being swept down the ice. Then it cut to a Muslim man shouting coaching and encouragement to the sweepers. And then it cut to the sweepers: two head-scarved Muslim women feverishly sweeping the ice before the stone. And finally, it cut to some locals staring open-mouthed, trying to comprehend this juxtaposition. That commercial beautifully encapsulated the culture-clash premise of the show, and I had to learn more about this strange new show, Little Mosque on the Prairie.

So I went to the Web site to learn more. They have some character descriptions, some cast bios, and some clips. Ali Eteraz thought the one joke was cheesy, but I thought it was funnier than typical sitcom jokes, a nice bit of wordplay. And I thought the clips of Amaar Rashid (Zaib Shaikh) in the airport were quite good. So I was looking forward to tonight's premier.

But when all is said and done, all I can say so far is: it's a sitcom.

Some of the jokes were quite good. Some were average. Some were flat. In other words, a sitcom. I haven't decided if it's the writing or his delivery, but I got the most laughs out of Zaib Shaikh as brother Amaar. I dare say that he'll make the show, if anyone can. Unlike a typical American sitcom, there was no one who was an absolute idiot (save perhaps for one minor character), and I'm happy to say there was no wise wife/dolt husband couple, which has become the most boring cliche on American TV.

This is a show about culture clash, but not just Muslim/Canadian culture clash. Amaar has trouble adjusting to life in the small prairie town of Mercy, because he has spent his life in Toronto and other world capitols. He's a cosmopolitan dumped into a rural enclave, and he just expects too much. Meanwhile, the local Muslims are just as bad, looking down their noses at him because he's a City Mouse in the Country.

And of course, there's Muslim/Canadian clashing. I think it's a bit exaggerated when one local freaks out because he sees Muslims praying in the church community hall, but it's a necessary part of the situation of this sitcom. The local radio show host Fred Tupper (Neil Crone) is a rather broad parody of hate radio, but not nearly as broad as, say, Michael Savage. And there's bigotry on the other side as well: the former Imam Baber Siddiqui (Manoj Sood) assumes the worst from every non-Muslim he sees.

But there are decent, well-meaning characters as well. Besides Amaar, there's Reverend Duncan McGee (Derek McGrath), who tries to set an example of communication and understanding. There's Fatima Dinssa (Arlene Duncan), who runs the local diner and takes joy in deflating egos. There's Yasir Hamoudi (Carlo Rota), who's a bit of a schemer and a scoundrel; but he must have his lovable side, because his wife Sarah (Sheila McCarthy) finds something to love in him. And there's their daughter Rayyan (Sitara Hewitt), who's a devout Muslim and looks fated to be the voice of reason on the show.

It wasn't earth-shattering, but it was decent enough to watch again. Some of the jokes were hard for a non-Muslim to grasp: I sort of understand the difficulty of calculating the start of Ramadan, for example, but I'll bet Muslims appreciated the humor more. As Wikipedia explains, "Most Muslims insist on the local physical sighting of the moon to mark the beginning of Ramadan, but some insist on using the calculated time of the new moon or the Saudi Arabian declaration to determine the start of the month. As a result, Ramadan dates vary in different countries, but usually only by a day or two." The characters argue over the best approach, with one using a telescope, one wanting to check a Web site, one wanting to eyeball it, one wanting to call Saudi Arabia, and Yasir shouting, "Not with my cell minutes!"

But Amaar's Ramadan sermon crossed cultural lines, mixing humor and humility and warmth. At the same time, it told a little of what Ramadan means to Muslims. It was a good close for the show.

As far as I can tell, nobody goes unskewered in this show: Muslim and Islamophobe, Christian and Christophobe, City Mouse and Country Mouse, men and women. And none of it seemed vicious; rather, it was good-natured jabs to remind people to laugh at themselves and each other. Because after all, "Muslims around the world are known for their sense of humor." "I did not know that."

I look forward to hearing some Muslim opinions on this show.

In a complete lack of political correctness, they're called "booth babes": women with model-quality looks, hired to stand in your trade show booth and draw attention to your products that might otherwise get overlooked. They're usually well-endowed, and they're usually dressed on the thin line between business casual and vamp. Sometimes they cross that line. It's a crass technique, but it works, especially in the tech world, where men still outnumber women by quite a bit. Just ask my marketing friend Lauren, who has never worked as a booth babe herself (at least not that she has admitted), but who won't hesitate to hire them. (She once told of meeting the official West Coast spokesmodel for Barbie, who was working as a booth babe at one of our shows. Apparently, there's big money in booth babing.)