Anyone who has burned a few hours visiting neighbors on the Web knows that HTML is the folk art of the '90s - most homepages are as naively precious as a "Bless This Home" needlepoint. But our decade is also known for holding a mirror to its own campy excess, so nothing could be more fin-de-millennium than a folky Web site devoted to a folk shrine called the Sticks and Stones House.

The house was created by the late Clyde Farnell of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Apparently Farnell lost an eye in a popsicle-stick incident as a child; as an adult, he spent more than 25 years decorating the walls of his modest Canadian home with popsicle sticks and various other scraps of trash (including small rocks).

The Web site, meanwhile, is just as earnest and cryptic as its subject matter. The photos are numerous, tiny, and cluttered with Farnell's decorations. The text (interview? literary experiment?) is a real brow-knitter, lacking punctuation and quotation marks. But the project as a whole is so brightly bathed in the light of sincerity that real criticism is impossible. Folk is as folk does; and as this site proves that nothing is stranger than just plain folks.