Odd Obsessions

People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.

A scatterplot of six thousand music genres you have never heard of, each one clickable for a sample and a list of its bands.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

The real museum of 25,000 banana-related objects has a website, and it looks exactly as you are already imagining.

Art too bad to be ignored, collected since 1993 and catalogued with entirely straight-faced curatorial commentary.

Click a dial-up modem, a Nokia ringtone or a VHS rewinder and remember precisely where you were standing at the time.

The definitive index of American roadside oddities: the giant fibreglass animals, the museums devoted to exactly one thing.

Sweet wrappers collected and annotated for decades, arranged by how well the graphic design has survived contact with the present.

One cat looking at a monitor showing a cat looking at a monitor, several thousand cats deep and still accepting submissions.

Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.

A team counted every squirrel in Central Park and published the data, the maps and a full illustrated report on the findings.

Scanned cereal boxes going back decades, with full career histories for the mascots, maintained purely for its own sake.

Recordings of very nearly every bird call on earth, uploaded by amateurs and searchable by species, country and even call type.