A guy in the UK has what may be the largest collection of crappy Simpsons merchandise on the planet.  According to thisisbristol.co.uk:

A Bristol man believes he has the biggest collection of Simpsons memorabilia in the world.

Glynne Williams has more than 30,000 items linked to the popular cartoon TV series, but they are currently all in his loft in Patchway.

The 42-year-old courier says only close friends and family have seen the collection, but he thinks there is enough interest in the bright yellow characters to open it up to the public.

Over the past 12 years, he’s spent more than £50,000 on the collection.

The article goes on to mention asking Guinness about this, apparently the current record holder lives in Australia, but I don’t see it anywhere on their website, even the “collections” page and Google was similarly unhelpful.

Now, some people collect things and while I am not one of them it seems like a relatively harmless hobby so I’ve got no problem with it.  But isn’t this revealing?:

Glynne said: “I wasn’t a huge fan before it all, but I did watch it. Now I have watched every single episode ever made – a couple of times.

“Whenever we go on holiday I pick something up – armbands from Tenerife, a nuclear powerplant lava lamp from Florida.

Setting aside the fact that the mere thought of watching some of the Zombie Simpsons episodes more than once makes my skin crawl, we’re left with a guy who wasn’t much of a fan at first and then got into the show because he was collecting its crap.  His wife collects teddy bears and my sneaking suspicion is that if he weren’t collecting Simpsons stuff he’d be collecting something else.

The great irony here, of course, is that the show on which all this stuff is based hated its own merchandise and frequently made fun of it (and, by extension, the people who buy it).  Oh yeah, and that power plant lava lamp?  It exists: