What the hell?
As you probably know, today is Everybody Draw Mohammed day. In case you’re wondering, I’m not participating. Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything clever to draw. And you probably wouldn’t have recognized it if I tried. In case you haven’t noticed, Windypundit doesn’t have a cartoon section. There’s a reason for that.
On the other hand, I was looking forward to Reason magazine’s post on the subject. They’ve been asking people to send them drawings of Mohammed for about a month, and I wanted to check them out. So I waited, and waited, and waited…until finally, late in the afternoon, they posted this.
What the hell? They say they received over 190 images, but they just picked three winners and wrote a long article. Where are the other 187 images? I thought I’d get to see them all.
As for the winners, I think the first one is kind of dumb, the second one is pretty funny, and the third is absolutely brilliant. But there’s a problem with all of them: They’re not really pictures of Mohammed. Granted, none of the Mohammed drawings are pictures of Mohammed because nobody knows what he looked like: You only know it’s Mohammed becasue of the context (which is kind of the point of these three winning images).
Still, if people are going to celebrate free speech by drawing Mohammed, I would have expected the images to be a little more in-your-face offensive, like the original images here. Or this.
The post is a little strange for a couple of other reasons as well. First, it’s hosted on Amazon’s storage server at this URL: http://reason-contest.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. What, did they think it would get so many hits that their server would crash? Maybe if they had all the images, but not with this weak collection.
Second, like most Reason articles, this one was announced in Reason‘s Hit & Run blog when it went up. But unlike every other post I’ve seen there, this one doesn’t allow comments.
What the hell is going on at Reason? Are they owned by Comedy Central now?
Update: Got an answer from the boss.
I liked the first one, even though it was pretentious. The second and third were kind of lame. You’re right, though, none really qualify as drawings of Mohammed.