When it comes to clubs, I'm not much of a joiner.

I even let my membership in Sam's Club lapse. Figuring out ways to wedge huge breakfast cereal packages into normal-sized cabinets proved to be just too exciting for me. In the absence of natural disasters or nuclear attack, having blister-wrapped cases of mac and cheese and hogsheads of laundry detergent on hand gave me more stress than peace of mind.

As for clubs involving hobbies, I'd rather spend my limited free time actually doing the few recreational activities I pursue than going to meetings and talking about them. And happily, for the moment, at least, I've still got too much follicle activity going on upstairs to qualify for membership in Hair Club for Men.

But my disinclination to align myself with an organization began to waver recently, when I stumbled upon the website for the Dull Men's Club (www.dullmensclub.com), an international, British-based online fraternity of guys who celebrate the ordinary. On its home page, club slogans like "born to be mild," "It's okay to be dull," and "There's nothing wrong with second place; it's the second mouse that gets the cheese" scroll through a message space.

While travel doesn't seem to be something that would interest dull men, certain aspects of the travel process are explored on the website. At the top of that category is the airport luggage carousel, which every dull man looks forward to encountering immediately after deplaning, if for no other reason, to check off the first item on his mental "to-do" list for the travel leg.

To make the carousel stop less stressful, dull men from around the world post on the club's website the direction in which the carousel turns in airports from Albania's Tirana International (counter-clockwise) to Zimbabwe's Harare Airport (clockwise), allowing other dull men to more efficiently begin their baggage searches. One of the most recent postings featured the baggage carousel arrangement at the airport serving Norfolk, Va., where there are two carousels that spin in opposite directions. "Fascinating to watch," commented the poster.

The club has an annual Dull Man of the Year award, and this year's nominees include Michael Kennedy, who lives along England's Norfolk coast, and spends two hours each day, except Saturdays, placing rocks at the base of cliffs to prevent shoreline erosion. A surprise nominee is musician and lifestyle anti-coach Keith Richards -- not for his work as a Rolling Stone, but for his hobby of buying, then personally arranging via the Dewey Decimal system, vast quantities of books.

Previous "Dull Man" winners include Welshman Keith Jackson, whose career has involved more than 30 years of assessing the drying time of industrial paint.

Click on the club's book review section, and you can learn about such Dull Man page-turners as "The Art of Napping," "Boring Postcards USA," or the "Cod: Biography of the Fish that Changed the World."

Then there are links to Dull Man-friendly museums, ranging from Rune's Barf Bag Collection, featuring 1,291 airsickness bags from 481 airlines, to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn.

For those who consider bird watching too exciting an activity, the Dull Men's Club suggests taking up moth watching, since, according to a Guardian newspaper article on the subject, "Most moths are small, brown and hard to identify."

Unlike organizations with 12-step programs, the Dull Men's Club only has two: 1. We admit that we are dull. 2. We're going to keep it that way.

I plan to begin working the steps soon, but first, there's a re-run on the construction of the Hoover Dam playing on The History Channel that I really need to watch.