Mayoral Candidate’s Bizarre Website Apparently Hasn’t Been Updated Since ’97

Larry Heather is running for mayor in Calgary, Canada. Platform concerns aside, the guy really ought to fire his website designer if he wants to be taken seriously.

Heather’s campaign website came to me from Fark’s front page this morning where it’s linked under the introduction “Running for mayor in 2013… I guess I’ll need one of those website thingies.” Naturally I clicked, and what I saw is what you see above and what you can see in more detail here.

No, that’s not an Angelfire website from 1997. That’s from 2013. That’s from this year.

This goes without saying, but it’s a real blast from the past. A genuine treat. As soon as you click on it, you’ll hear some oddly sad midi-sounding music meant to dovetail with the tiled desert sunset photo.

The title “Democracy at Twilight” is sitting center stage along with a strange link to StatCounter, an analytics suite for website traffic. It would be impossibly hilarious if the link actually sent you to Heather’s site traffic stats, but alas, it just asks you to sign up for StatCounter.

Still, I haven’t seen a website this good since Time Cube. It’s so unbelievably self-evident I’m having a hard time even writing about it. The best I could do for the first 20 minutes of staring at the homepage was “how can this exist… ”

Naturally, we’re all wondering “why” and also, possibly, “isn’t there anyone in Larry Heather’s life/campaign that has had Internet access since 1997?”

Funny you should ask. I thought about calling his office, but decided to do a bit of background on Larry Heather first. He’s an aspiring politician and activist, highly conservative, and a self-described “Christian option” on the ballot. Fine fine, really not all that different from half of the politicians here in the states, right?

Except that our politicians usually don’t keep trying for office after 30 years of failed campaigning.

Mr. Heather, earnest an well-meaning though he may be, has run in 13 other elections since 1984, and has come in almost dead-last in every single one.

I’m not going to make fun of Mr. Heather, I just want to know one thing… and it’s so painfully direct I’m almost embarrassed to ask. Does he really think this is a good website? For 2013, not 1997. Actually yeah, is this even a good website for 1997? I’ll let you folks decide. Let me know in the comments!