It's because I've been reading What's Shakin', an online 'zine for domophiles. It's the kind of site where movie reviews read as follows: "We recently rented The Avengers with Sean Connery. It's not the best movie but it's all worth it when you see Sean's character's snowglobe collection!" This critique is interesting because it may well be the only positive review The Avengers got, but there's more to it than that. One of the joys of the Web is the discovery of a subculture; a community of people linked by their interests or hobbies. 

   I can't quite explain why (perhaps it's nothing more than cultural voyeurism), but I can spend hours wandering through these networks, trying to see the world through the eyes of their inhabitants (could the presence of a dome really have made Godzilla worth seeing?). It's like taking a holiday; visiting a foreign country. And the trip is made smoother, of course, by the inevitable web rings devoted to the cause, collections of these sites holding hands around the globe. These rings provide a much better way to mine specific seams than the functionally limited, hit-and-miss search engines. 

   Closer to home, Lisa Crowe started collecting snowdomes two years ago but says she wishes she'd begun three or four decades earlier. Her web site is a tribute to the Australian snowdome, which she considers an endangered species. "While domes are making a big comeback in the United States," she explains on the site, "these exquisite little pieces of kitsch are becoming as rare as hen's teeth in Australia. The old-fashioned style of dome with the blue back and molded, sometimes hand painted, 3-D panels is disappearing faster than table manners and free state education." Visitors to her site can inspect domes from all States and territories, with subjects including Victoria's Giant Worm, Wrest Point Casino, South Australia's Big Orange and what was then Ayers Rock. They are also welcome to submit pictures of their own dome.

   Traveling north, Snowglobe Garden brings together four small Japanese collections. Most of the text on the site is in Japanese but not all of it (I kid you not - there's a Bugs Bunny dome called "Roony Toons"). Indicating a different curatorial eye, the domes on display usually involve cartoon and fictional characters or holiday destinations. Mr. Toki, for example, has clearly been to Paris. Taking a sharp and long turn to the west, Remco's Snowglobes is home to a collection from The Netherlands, where these fetishable items are also known as snow storms and the more poetic Schneekugel. Remco is slowly putting his 250-strong catalogue of domes online. His main themes are animal domes and religious figures.

   If all this makes you want to start your own collection, there are online vendors, from Pinky's Souvenir Land to Apocalyptic Locust Domes, a company dedicated to ringing in 2000 by offering a complete set of Biblical plague domes. "Why wait?" their web site cheerfully asserts. "With a little swish of your wrist, you can make millions of ravenous locusts descend upon the toiling farmer and devour the world's food supply ANY TIME YOU WANT! Two starving cows included!" These domes are "hand-crafted in the USA from the finest plastics and filled with 100% American Tap Water". At $20 plus shipping, they may be the bargain of the millennium. "Coming Soon," the site promises, "Rivers of Blood, Surge of Toads, Unruly Lice, Swarms of Flies, Pestilence of Livestock, Heavy Hail with Lightning, Three Days of Darkness, Death of Your First Born, and BOILS!"