I graduated from SIU and was never bored while I was going to school there.
They had great concerts with huge, name acts.
They had lots of festivals and mini-concerts with local acts - REO Speedwagon for instance was there often and I got to know them pretty well.
Back then it was a hotbed of political activity.
Lots of foreign students to hang out with and learn about other cultures and countries.
Great parks and thing to do outdoors.
At least for a student at SIU, it was not boring. Now, living there after you graduate? That might have been a bit much.
I’ll see Carbondale, IL, and raise you Aberdeen, SD. Not only is it empty, and dull, and dying the way only plains towns can be, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and you have to drive for hours through nothing to get away from there.
I only go down to Carbondale to hike, and to get pizza from Quatros, and bubble tea from the place down the road. But it’s also a college town, so I doubt it can really be considered the most boring town in IL, let alone the US as a whole.
Ha! Just go up the road to DuQuoin…
Rule of thumb: If you can remember the name long enough to write it down, it’s not the boringest.
I’ve camped all over the Eastern half of the U.S. and can testify that there are a lot of boring towns. On the other hand, maybe I just didn’t know where to look. My camping partner is in the habit of asking locals, “so what have you got here that other towns don’t?” We’ve discovered some delightfully quirky things that way.
I spent a year one summer in Lima, Ohio. It’s flat. There are only a handful of restaurants and one dingy mall. The main thing to do is to go to the reservoir. It’s 100 miles to get to the “exciting” towns of Dayton, Toledo or maybe Fort Wayne. There is not a beach, a river, or a mountain anywhere really close by.
The postcards in the Holiday Inn (there was also a Motel 6) was a picture of the wall of the factory I was working at there. Not an aerial view, but a picture of a brick wall.
The downtown did have a bunch of junkies (maybe prostitutes?) milling about - someone said this was caused by the coke trade along the I-75 corridor between South Florida and Detroit, so it did have that going for it.
Added for balance: the regular folks that lived and worked there were extremely friendly and seemed to enjoy the place.
Hays isn’t so bad, but some of those other towns along I-70 in Western Kansas could probably give Carbondale a run for it’s money.
:p:p:p
I live in a “trying to be a happenin’ place” (good luck with that), but I must say, ‘Carbondale, Illinois’ is a really boring-sounding name… Like on Roseanne, ‘Lanford, Michigan’. One pictures a 20 year old mall with a food stand called ‘Taters Taters Taters.’
As my east of east st louis designation implies, I’m from around these parts. I also went to school at SIU-C. Who the fuck is Bill Bryson?
Actually, I hear the carbon dating in Carbondale is really hot! 
Well, you can dress it up like a few boozy locals and pronounce it car-bahn-del-ay.
And has one of the great nicknames in college sports – Salukis, after the Egyptian breed of dog (the southern part of Illinois is known as “Little Egypt”, for various putative reasons). The most famous Saluki of the hardwood was Walt Frazier, who later starred for the New York Knicks. Other notable SIU alumni include entertainers Jim Belushi, Dennis Franz, Richard Roundtree, and Jenny McCarthy, as well as athletes Dave Stieb, Steve Finley, and Jim Hart.
Woo Hoo! I’m from Effingham, originally!
I always thought Normal, Illinois should have that distinction.
Carbondale is the birthplace of Frank Trumbauer.
ShibbOleth, more about Lima, Ohio:
I grew up about 25 miles from Lima, and my father worked in Lima most of his career. Since I grew up on a farm, Lima was the big city. It was considerably larger than the small towns which were anywhere from 200 to 2,000 people that I knew better.
Lima is famous as being the subject of a Lenny Bruce routine about a boring gig he did there:
http://popup.lala.com/popup/432627086502426146
More recently, it’s famous as being the setting of the TV show Glee.
I notice that the towns that people are listing in these threads are what I think of as small cities, generally 10,000 to 50,000 people. These were what I thought of as the place where one goes into the city (perhaps to do shopping) when I was young, since the towns that composed our school district or that our school competed with were all of around 200 to 2,000 people.
Redwing, Ha! My cousins moved TO Aberdeen, because it’s the big city in that part of the state. You want boring? Try Selby, SD. I’m not entirely sure they have any businesses, other than the nursing home, if you consider that a business. People have to drive to Mobridge to do their shopping. (I thought about Glenham, but it doesn’t actually exist anymore, so I think that puts it out of the running.)
I have a feeling that in 100 years, we’re going to look back and say that settled agricultural population of the Upper Great Plains was a failed experiment, and let it all go back to prairie and wandering populations of humans and animals.
When I lived in Urbana, Carbondale had quite the party town rep. Then again, perhaps the only thing to do there was drink. YMMV.
Mr. Bryson has obviously never spent any time in Leesville, Louisiana. I also think he needs a rectal cranial extraction.
I’d take Carbondale over Leesville any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
I don’t think it’s boring here at all. I love Carbondale.