Last Exit to Springfield. The name of the city and the almost-arcane allusion should clue you in immediately that this site is dedicated to the best show on television, The Simpsons. The official address is lardlad.com, and any good self-respecting Simpsons fan knows who Lard Lad is. Of the many Simpsons-related sites on the internet, this is certainly one of the best.
Unlike its rival, The Simpsons Archive (which IS the best Simpsons site on the internet), this one is designed more for the casual, or at least the non-obsessive, fan. Relying more upon visual stimulation than its cousin, lardlad.com offers a satisfying collection of the one thing that snpp.com doesn't offer: images and sound files. Here you will find not just the usual wallpaper images found on most other Simpsons sites, but also old-fashioned ascii art, an impressive collection from entire sequences from the Sunday morning comic strip version of the show, chat icons both animated and not so much, as well as web content such as fonts, media player skins, a chalkboard quote screensaver and crude games.
The site does have some interesting articles and they are all unique to this site as well as unique because they are all from Australian sources. The character biography page is cute and somewhat informative. The cast bios are likewise lacking in depth, but provide a good start for those who know nothing about the voiceover actors so central to the show's success. The episode guide are really just capsule summaries of the episodes, providing nothing like the fanaticist attention to detail at The Simpsons Archive, but the actual plot summaries here are much more focused. If you're just wanting to know what happened in any given episode, this is the site for you, though be aware that there is no spoiler alert and all secrets of the episodes are revealed. The gem of this section, indeed the crown jewel of the entire site, are links to FTP sites allowing you to download and view all of the original Simpsons shorts that first aired on the Tracey Ullman Show.
The merchandise information section is basically just a collection of images associated with the merchandise along with a link to Amazon.Com. The news section, strangely enough, sends you to Simpsonschannel.com, an entirely different site.
One of the best things about this site is its interactivity section. Here you will find contests to enter based on games involving decoding a quote from the show; figuring out a mystery episode based only on frame captures from the episode in question (and the frames are not terribly obvious, so be forewarned), naming which character owns a particular object (again, not something obvious), a memory match game and a sliding puzzle. These are all fun, but extremely challenging. This is the one part of the site devoted especially to hardcore fans.
There is also access to a message board and an ask the experts section that should already have the answer on site to that nagging question you have about what episode Bart says he says something to Mabel or how Homer actually lost all his hair.
About the only downside to Lardlad.com is that it does tend to load a little slowly, but then again every page is filled with great images of OFF.
And if you don't know what I mean by OFF, then you really should go immediately to the ask the experts section as soon as you are finished here.