eerieindiana | Entries tagged with place: normal illinois

Get inside your Windmaster Trailers and strap in tight, because we're about to rewatch Tornado Days

It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Bermuda Triangle versus Normal Illinois

froodle

Get inside your Windmaster Trailers and strap in tight, because we're about to rewatch Tornado Days

froodle

had a curséd dream where i was hired as a sensitivity reader for a new CW show set in a small town called PRONOUNS, OHIO
— moron of idiot experience (@Lubchansky) January 16, 2020

are you aware of the swiftly cancelled 2000 John Goodman gay dad vehicle Normal, Ohio? because if you’re not this is even spookier
— Chloe Alison Escott (@vesselskirt) January 16, 2020

the eerie, indiana crossover ep writes itself, fam
— Shrill wolfcryer crying at the Wolf Eyes show (@by_caballero) September 14, 2020

froodle

Nobody believes me, but this is the center of weirdness for the entire planet: Eerie, Indiana. My home, sweet home. Still don't believe me?😱😜 pic.twitter.com/oITEfcMl34
— The Retro Room 🎮🕹🎬🎥 (@TheRetroRoomRoo) June 16, 2020

Sister city to Normal, Illinois. Where you can get Black Cows (the milkshake) god I miss that show
— joe brownfield (@kenpachi_elric) June 17, 2020

froodle

Normal, Illinois is just some Eerie, Indiana type poo poo.

Our sister city!

It's because Illinois State University was once called Illinois State Normal University because "Normal" meant it was an educational college or something like that

froodle

Home sweet home.

froodle

Get inside your Windmaster Trailers and strap in tight, because we're about to rewatch Tornado Days

froodle

Just discovered Eerie, Indiana is on prime. There goes my night.
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

Reboot Eerie, Indiana you cowards pic.twitter.com/vsCMPhVuwL
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

I was this years old when I realized the title is a play on my sister-in-law’s hometown of Normal, Illinois
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

“My family thinks I’m weird. Better weird then dead.” This show owns. pic.twitter.com/cVIpDYHdjX
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

SCHIAVELLI pic.twitter.com/RWReVk8ofj
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

The second episode ends with a neighborhood kid being eaten alive by stray dogs while they were mounting a revolution at a high kill shelter. You know, for kids.
— Nick Sinnott (@ndsinnott) September 23, 2019

froodle

If that's weird, I think we probably all live there.

Like Weird, Arizona or someplace.
— Melissa May (@melissa_mayb) August 27, 2019

Eerie, Indiana! I had nothing else to contribute I just wanted to mention it.
— Queen of Nevers (@liminalnobilis) August 27, 2019

Eternal enemy of Normal, IL
— StellaCorvus (@StellaCorvus) August 27, 2019

froodle

A good friend of mine from ND gave me this beer when I was visiting back in July and now it's time to try it out.

With the name "Destihl", it seems more like a company that should be producing riding lawn mowers for wannabe farmers more than beer.. but here we are.. it's actually a brewery! Destihl Brewery is out of Normal, Illinois.. which makes it even weirder than it should be, more eerie than Eerie, Indiana.

Today, I'm checking out Destihl's Amra Mango IPA. The ber itself is advertised at 6.9% ABV, 55 IBU, and uses 2-row malt, flaked wheat and caramel malt 20.

froodle

Eerie Indiana mentioned my hometown once and it was a big fucking deal to 8 year old me
— David Fairbanks Reads Comics I Guess (@bairfanx) April 24, 2019

froodle

It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Normal Illinois versus Old Hitchcock Mill

froodle

Get inside your Windmaster Trailers and strap in tight, because we're about to rewatch Tornado Days

froodle

Normal is a town in McLean County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2010 census, the town's population was 52,497.[4] Normal is the smaller of two principal municipalities of the Bloomington–Normal metropolitan area, and Illinois' seventh most populous community outside the Chicago metropolitan area. Normal's mayor is Chris Koos.

froodle

Get inside your Windmaster Trailers and strap in tight, because we're about to rewatch Tornado Days

froodle

Last year, three little, oft-maligned towns across the world decided it was time to transcend their stigma and use their unfortunate names as a force for good. United by common pain—and the prospect of a little extra tourism—the municipalities of Bland, Australia; Boring, Oregon; and Dull, Scotland teamed up to create what they call the League of Extraordinary Communities, but which many have dubbed the Trinity of Tedium. Although part of the union is about reclaiming the joke of their names and having a good laugh themselves, it’s also just one of many strange bids by small towns to bring in a few extra dollars. And it appears to be working, which we can only hope means we’ll see more such confederacies soon.

For those unfamiliar with the villages, here’s a quick primer: Bland, full name Bland Shire, is a town of 6,400 in the dead center of Australia’s New South Wales state. Named after William Bland, one of Australia’s first medical practitioners and a convict shipped to the continent after killing a man in a duel in then-Bombay, the town now sports a small gold mine, but not much else. Boring, Oregon, the largest of the trio with 13,000 residents, is named for early settler William H. Boring, a Civil War Union solider. Home to a center for Seeing Eye Dog training, and some of the worst business puns known to man, residents have been known to post signs reading “the most exciting place to live” around town. And little Dull, Scotland, with just 84 residents living along one street in the Tay Valley, is by far the smallest of the group, but among the richest in history, featuring many historic Celtic and Christian sites alongside its rapidly declining modern structures and shrinking population.

Before Bland completed the trio last year, Boring and Dull linked up in 2012 after a Scottish woman on a cycling holiday in America passed a sign for Boring, and decided to tell the local Community Planning Organization about Dull. The result was a Dull & Boring Facebook page for residents to communicate together and some basic plans for cooperation and mutual promotion as a tourist duo. By doing so they followed in the tradition of Toledo, Ohio and Toledo, Spain, who became the world’s first sister cities based on an unlikely kinship in 1931.The union spawned 522 American communities with commercial and touristic ties to diverse and unexpected towns around the world. Last year, Neil Pokoney, mayor of Bland, heard about the partnership between Dull and Boring and decided he’d like to get in on the fun and profit—possibly after two Bland citizens visited Dull in 2013 and decided the union seemed like a great way to both channel and challenge the fun other Australians poked at them.

( Read more... )

froodle

About 15 years ago, an independent bookseller in Texas went to battle against the specter of mega-bookstore invasion. His weapon of choice was something a purveyor of books knew best: a word. And the word was weird.

KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD was coined by the librarian Red Wassenich while on the phone with a local radio station. But the phrase was adopted when Steve Bercu, owner of the Austin, Texas, bookstore Book People, needed a slogan to rally objection to a planned Borders store a few blocks away. Bercu convinced John Kunz, the owner of nearby Waterloo Records, to join the keep-it-local cause. They printed 5,000 bumper stickers urging citizens to KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD and flanked the message with their business logos. The stickers flew off the shelves. And the Borders bookstore was never built in downtown Austin.

“WEIRD resonated really well here,” said Bercu. “The point was to support local businesses. Everyone got it immediately.” Today, Bercu estimates that he’s given away more than 300,000 stickers. Indeed, the success of KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD inspired independent business communities from Oregon to California and beyond. Why has weird spread so far?

Terry Currier, the owner of Portland, Oregon’s Music Millennium store, was a frequent visitor to Austin and a longtime friend of Kunz’s. As he worried about the future of his city, the weird war in Austin struck a chord. “I wanted some kind of campaign to champion local businesses,” said Currier. “Portland has always been an entrepreneur’s town with a lot of open-minded and creative people.”

He started off with 1,000 KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD bumper stickers and ran a newspaper ad with a simple image of the sticker—no business logo, no explanatory message. “Then the thing just kept growing and growing, to the point where news commentators used the motto and it showed up in the papers and pictures,” he said. Now it’s entrenched in the local culture and immortalized in Portlandia.

Seven hundred plus miles to the south—and just a little left—Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Neal Coonerty printed KEEP SANTA CRUZ WEIRD stickers after meeting Bercu at a booksellers’ conference. “We don’t want to become just another gentrified suburb of Silicon Valley,” said Coonerty. “The main street of our downtown is more than just an exchange of goods, it’s where the community expresses itself with street artists, political tabling, and one-of-a-kind parades. We want to make sure it stays that way.”

Not everyone wants to be weird, though. Santa Cruz city supervisor Ryan Coonerty, Neal’s son, says he regularly hears complaints that promoting weird is akin to encouraging criminal or antisocial activity. Some local business owners prefer to be known as “safe and sane.”

Across the river from the weirdness in Portland, the locals have lobbied to KEEP VANCOUVER NORMAL. In the flatlands of West Texas there’s a call to KEEP ABILENE BORING. Just north of Austin, the Dell Computer headquarters wants to KEEP ROUND ROCK MILDLY UNUSUAL. On the other hand, in the home of two infamous shootouts, natives recognize their destiny is to KEEP WACO WACKO. And there’s a KEEP IT QUERQUE crusade in New Mexico.

Weird campaigns have spread to communities in more than a dozen states. What do they all have in common? The cities have fewer than 1 million people, but most are growing. Many are state capitals or county seats and most have a vibrant arts scene. They all seem to have a strong sense of what makes them unique, and a grassroots urge to stay that way.

That cities cast their lot with weird has an uncanny connection back to the word’s origin. The Old English wyrd has roots in the base wer (meaning “to become” or “to turn”) and was once connected to the idea of destiny. In Norse mythology, Wyrd (Urðr) is one of the three female fates who shape the lives of every child. But wyrd was going extinct when Shakespeare cast the Three Wyrd Sisters in the role of the fates who prophesied that Macbeth would murder Scotland’s king. To provide context for audiences unfamiliar with the word, the Bard created “double, double toil and trouble” sorts of activities for the sisters; that link to the supernatural followed wyrd thereafter.

Poets like Shelley and Keats reinterpreted weird to describe the odd or strange. And then weird went into hibernation through much of the 20th century, until popular culture revived it yet again. In the 1980s, the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic and the movie Weird Science imbued the word with a quirkier, goofier meaning. Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have tracked weirdness for 20 years, with published guides to weird attractions and a History Channel series called Weird U.S.

Despite its countercultural bona fides, weird has economic power. From indie booksellers to microbrews and real estate, leveraging quirkiness is good for business. Weird isn’t just a way of being, it’s an economic strategy, one that has the rough-hewn, indie-rock air of an anti-strategy. Marketing specialist Seth Godin promotes weirdness as a way to celebrate choice and push back against mass production and consumption in his book We Are All Weird. “The opportunity of our time is to support the weird, to sell to the weird and, if you wish, to become weird,” he writes.

Underneath it all, the affinity for weirdness harkens back to the oldest origins of wyrd, which conjured mastery over the fates. From booksellers in Austin to hippies in Portland to squares in Abilene, we all want to control our own destinies. Is that so weird?

froodle

Pop culture is full of stories about people trying to escape the boring-ass town they were born in. Not so in Boring, Oregon. As one inhabitant remarks, "Nobody leaves. They think they're gonna go, but they stay."

Just like the Hotel California!

In a short film by Ogilvy & Mather London, a brand that we won't mention until later (to avoid spoiling the reveal) takes us directly to Boring—which actually exists!—to learn its charms, attributes and history.

"It's a fun town," one woman gamely insists. "Yeah, it is! It's just fun."

froodle

Written for the 3rd June challenge over at

fffc. The prompt was "in-laws", so I decided to write about to Eerie's sister city of Normal, Illinois, and it kind of ended up being a crossover with Gortimer Gibbons

( Read more... )

( Read more of the Weather series here )

froodle

Written for Day 10 of the

31_days challenge. The prompt was, "by land or water, girl, get outta town"

( Read more... )

( Read the rest of the Janet-verse below the cut: )

froodle

Hope no-one here has been disrespectful, because Old Bob might carry you off in a fit of piques. Climb inside your Windmaster Trailer and let's have a picnic because these are... Tornado Days.

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Page Summary

froodle - Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2021: Tornado Days
froodle - Eerie Indiana Chooseday Challenge
froodle - Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2020: Tornado Days
froodle - Eerie Indiana crossover
froodle - kenpachi_elric on Eerie Indiana
froodle - Eerie Indiana and Normal Illinois
froodle - tinycakevillage on Eerie Indiana's sister city
froodle - Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2019: Tornado Days
froodle - NDSinnott on Eerie Indiana
froodle - The most important contribution
froodle - Review: Destihl Brewery Amra Mango India Pale Ale
froodle - As someone who cheered when Supernatural mentioned the Manx language, I feel this
froodle - Chooseday Challenge
froodle - Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2018: Tornado Days
froodle - Wiki page for Eerie's sister city
froodle - Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2017: Tornado Days
froodle - How the Towns of Bland, Dull, and Boring Made Their Lame Names Work for Them
froodle - Slate article on "weirdness" as an economic strategy
froodle - Boring, Oregon: a sister city to Eerie and Normal?
froodle - Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Sisters
froodle - Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Plans
froodle - Eerie, Indiana rewatch 2015: episode twelve, Tornado Days

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To whom it may concern

Better weird than dead.

Entries tagged with place: normal illinois

Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2021: Tornado Days

Eerie Indiana Chooseday Challenge

Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2020: Tornado Days

Eerie Indiana crossover

kenpachi_elric on Eerie Indiana

Eerie Indiana and Normal Illinois

tinycakevillage on Eerie Indiana's sister city

Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2019: Tornado Days

NDSinnott on Eerie Indiana

The most important contribution

Review: Destihl Brewery Amra Mango India Pale Ale

As someone who cheered when Supernatural mentioned the Manx language, I feel this

Chooseday Challenge

Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2018: Tornado Days

Wiki page for Eerie's sister city

Eerie, Indiana Rewatch 2017: Tornado Days

How the Towns of Bland, Dull, and Boring Made Their Lame Names Work for Them

Slate article on "weirdness" as an economic strategy

Boring, Oregon: a sister city to Eerie and Normal?

Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Sisters

Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Plans

Eerie, Indiana rewatch 2015: episode twelve, Tornado Days

Profile

June 2025

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