On Stuff From Simpler Times - Part 3

Remember this guy?

Good old Mahir.

Single best personal website in the history of personal websites. Bar none. I defy you to present a better one. You can't do it. Seriously. Save your strength.

• SHE CAN STAY MY HOME . . . . . .

Hundreds of thousands of people visited his site over the course of a few weeks in 1999. In the days after I first saw it, I viewed it dozens of times. And laughed every time. I still laugh every time I look at it. It's fantastic.

Mahir appeared on talk shows. A reporter at Salon.com wrote this article and this article about him. I would lay decent odds those were by far her most widely-read articles. An Official Mahir Web-Ring followed, replete with dozens upon dozens of parodies of Mahir's homepage ("tributes"). He even made the Forbes Celebrity 100 List in 2000 (although their coverage was less than flattering (jerks)).

And Mahir got plenty of "kiss you" (see above) and "friendship from different country" for the whole thing. What a wonderful world. The internet can make your dreams (or the dreams some hacker imagines for you) come true.

And that's the truth, Ruth.