Looking for safe excitement? November is fig(1) month at the Dull Men's Club, a place in cyberspace(2) for men who feel "born to be mild" and enjoy watching grass grow and photographing garden sheds.
"Figs are good for you. High fibre and high nutritional value ... fat-free, sodium-free, cholesterol-free ... not to mention the great taste. And they are portable," enthuses the Dull Men's Club Web site (http://www.dullmen.com) just above its choice of "Anorak(3) of the Month".
While the rest of the Web teems with hazards -- Trojans, viruses, bots, phishers, spyware and other people - this monochrome(4) haven boasts "no violence or scary scenes" and does its best to exclude exclamation marks.
Instead, an analysis of baggage carousels(5) at 376 airports globally discovers that 44.8 percent rotate counterclockwise(6), 29 percent clockwise(7). The site also reveals the reason for that orientation.
"Many people - corporate executives and celebrities I've heard about - enjoy doing the dull things," the site's author Lee Carlson, also known as Grover Click, told Reuters.
"It's an ordinary subject taken to extremes. Here's one: take a bucket, fill it with water, put in some wood, and watch it warp."
For the Dull Men's Club, watching water freeze is stimulus enough, as is discovering the history of soap.
Visiting museums is a favourite dull men's activity, and the site contains references to a plethora of resources, from safety razors through aprons to water hydrants(8), via a comb museum in China and Jerusalem's Tax Museum.
"One of the museum's purposes was to be a place to learn about the routine work of the tax department. Wow ... it doesn't get much better than that," enthuses the site.
Women are excluded from the site's host society, the "National Council of Dull Men, Washington, D.C."
Carlson - a semi-retired former tax accountant -- founded the society with a few friends along the lines of gentlemen's clubs in London and New York, to share common interests.
"Our view is that women are not dull. Women are exciting. Moreover, we think women would be offended if we said they were dull ... that it would be politically incorrect to refer to women as being dull," the site says.
"We also question what they might do if they were in one of our meeting rooms. The first thing they probably would do is rearrange the furniture. We like our furniture where it already is."
