Indeedy. If you want to see and experience boredom of the paint-drying variety, check out the Polycell Home Page. http://www.polycell.co.uk. In fact, to be quite honest, check out most of the retail web sites and experience similar. I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow description of the sort of retail sites that are online and what can be bought from them. You can do that for yourselves by going to 'The UK's most authoritative, fully searchable database of the world's best (retail) web sites' http://www2.emap.com/review/Shopping.htm Suffice to say, most of what they're flogging is either (a) tack that no-one except a devotee of the Franklin Mint would be interested in; or (b) the sort of stuff that, although normal enough, no rational person would dream of buying online, sight unseen: cars, clothes, houses and jewellery, for instance. Cyberspace lacks that essential 'touch and feel'.

    Fact: the Internet is too slow to be taken seriously as a shopping medium. The majority of the online goods are those cranky things you find in shops like Times Past or the Innovations Catalogue. Even where they're not, you get the feeling that the retailer is only advertising them on the Internet to appear 'hip' and appeal to the fringe 'yoof' sector. I doubt know, in fact that they don't make many sales this way, nor do they expect to. Anyway, for an incisive comment on Internet shopping as a whole, I can do no better than point you to the Bovine Scathalia website (http://www.adnetsol.com/bovine/bovine.html): 'The chance to buy 100% bullshit.'