I tend not to do anything that others would find interesting. Many of the acquaintances of my age like to do things like travel, go dancing, see films, eat out, and so on. I, on the other hand, forego such excitement and enjoy being at home by myself, with just occasional interactions with other people. You could call me a dull person.

So I was interested in this article that spoke of a Dull Men’s Club that has apparently several million members online.

In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite.

“Posts that contain bitmoji-avatar-things are far too exciting, and will probably get deleted,” warn the rules of the Dull Men’s Club (Australian branch).
…

This is the place for quirky hobbies, obscure interests, the examination of small, ordinary things. It is a place to celebrate the mundane, the quotidian. It is a gentle antidote to pouting influencers and the often toxic internet; a bastion of civility; a polite clarion call to reclaim the ordinary. Above all, it is whimsical, deeply ironic, self-effacing and sarcastic humour.

There is an art to being both dull and droll. “It’s tongue-in-cheek humour,” says founder Grover Click (a pseudonym chosen for its dullness). “A safe place to comment on daily things.”Exclamation marks, he says, “are far too exciting.” (On his site, ridicule is against the rules, as is politics, religion, and swearing.)
…

It all started in New York in the early 1980s. Click, now 85, and his friends were sitting at the long bar of the New York Athletic club reading magazine articles about boxing, fencing, judo and wrestling. “One of my mates said, ‘Dude, we don’t do any of those things.’” They had to face it. They were dull. They decided to embrace their dullness.

As a joke, they started The Dull Men’s Club, which involved some very silly, dull activities. They chartered a tour bus but didn’t go anywhere. “We toured the bus. We walked around the outside of the bus a few times. And the driver explained the tyre pressures and turned on the windscreen wipers.”
…

Much of the minutiae of life gets on members’ nerves, as does poor workmanship. Five hundred amused comments followed a post about coat hangers inserted into hoops on rails in hotel rooms. “That would keep me up all night,” said one person.

The over or under toilet paper debate raged (politely) for two and a half weeks. Then there was the dismantling of electronic appliances. Or photographing post boxes, the ranking of every animated movie from one to 100 – 100 being “dull and pointless”. Members judge the speed of other people’s windscreen wipers against their own, or in the case of Australia’s Simon Molina, stuff as many used toilet rolls as possible inside another. “It’s extremely dull.” There was the late John Richards who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society and 94-year-old Lee Maxwell who has fully restored 1,400 antique washing machines – that no one will ever use.

I probably won’t join this group. It may be too intense for me.

Reading the article, though, reminded me of this sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

At my local bridge club, one member has his own coffee mug that has printed on the side “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I had never heard this before so I asked him what it meant and he said that it meant that whatever was the issue under discussion, it did not concern him and he wanted to have no part in it. I thought that it was one of those local idioms that people have. In Sri Lanka was have all manner of local idioms in the English language. “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs” and “Why don’t you grow brinjals in your back garden?” are two particularly weird ones. The former means that you are trying to teach someone something that they already know very well while the second is essentially telling someone that they are wasting your time and should go and do something else. How these came about would be fascinating (Why would grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Why would they suck eggs anyway?) but their origins are lost in the mists of time

But then two days ago I was watching the British police procedural “Dept Q” that takes place in Scotland and in one scene, the police detective starts to explain something to his superior and she cuts him off, saying “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I burst out laughing at hearing this and realized that it must be more than a local saying so looked it up.

It originates apparently in Polish as the literal translation of the expression “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy”. How such a phrase could have originated is not hard to guess. A circus is a chaotic situation and monkeys are hard to control and one can well imagine that it represents wanting to wash one’s hands of a messy situation.

I don’t know that I would even use such a saying myself. It sounds a little callous and unfeeling towards whoever is trying to explain something complicated to you.

But it is amusing.

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
[Read more…]

One of the worst things that can happen to a tortoise is to get flipped on its back. See what happened to one in this plight.

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.

The main other issue is the hostility that is sometimes expressed, often triggered by the most trivial of things. An email sent to me privately by a long-time lurker brought home to me how people might be hesitant to join in the conversation here, even if they have something to say, out of fear that something that they write, however well-intentioned, will be seized upon and responded to in a hostile manner by some of the most egregious offenders.

It is well known that the comments sections on the internet can be a cesspool. I had hoped that the people who come to this site would be different, leading to more mature exchanges. But I was clearly too sanguine. People should remember that this is a blog, not a journal or magazine. There are no copy editors, proof readers, and fact checkers. In such a casual atmosphere, people (and that includes me) will often inadvertently be less than precise or accurate in what they say and people should respond appropriately. If the error is trivial but the meaning is clear, the error should be ignored. If the meaning is not clear, clarification can be politely asked for. If it is a genuine error, a correction can be politely made. This courteous behavior should be obvious but clearly it isn’t for some people. So here is another rule: If I think people are being consistently rude or condescending or insulting (and I do not mean just abusive language but also the tone), I will ban the person.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others. Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. So here is the third rule: If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments.

So I would suggest that in future commenters think carefully before they post anything, taking into account what they say and how often they say something. They should try to put themselves in the shoes of the person they are arguing with and think about how they might feel if their comment had been directed at them. They should also think about how their comments might look to others. It surprises me that people do not realize how badly this kind of behavior reflects on themselves.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his Patreon account that you can contribute to if you would like to support the network. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

I realize that these guidelines are somewhat vague. So a good rule of thumb would be: If in doubt as to whether to post something because it might violate these boundaries, that is a good sign to not post it. I will be the sole judge of whether the boundary has been crossed.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to subvert the guidelines such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread. I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted. These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.