Boring is fascinating

It’s 6.20 in the morning and the first thing I do waking up is to check the scores on the United V QPR game. 1-0. The Guardian report called it a “soporific” game with second string United players and a QPR team that had ten men behind the ball. The only goal of the game came from a Tevez penalty. And I’m downloading the torrent while I write this. Without question, the most boring sporting spectacle that occurred in the last week and there’s a guy in India who has an otherwise low tolerance for tedium spending hours downloading the game on an unreliable Airtel connection. Am I onto something here? Is there a sweet spot in our brain that actually likes being bored? It’s not the first time, you know. I watched Steve McQueen’s 1967 war film ‘Sand Pebbles’ recently whose pacing could be best described as ‘close to stagnant’. I loved it. I might even watch it again. And there’s a whole bunch of us out there, who like Sand Pebbles and Thomas Hardy novels and watch 5-day test matches between West Indies and South Africa.

When someone asked Andy Warhol one time for an opinion of one of Edward Albee's many lesser works, he replied that he found it long and boring but that was all right with him because "I like long, boring things."

I know what he means.