Quote: *Have a barbecue on the ghetto porch, AKA the fire escape. Try not to fry your upstairs neighbor's petunias.

*Play Snake on your mobile
Yes, it's true that your mobile phone might be the only reliable alarm clock left in the house and that if the outage continues after bedtime there's no reliable means of rousing yourself for work the following morning, but there's no better use of your limited battery power than testing your reflexes against the ubiquitous and addictive Nokia serpent-steering game.

*Open a hydrant. Run through the spray until the cops come.

*Eat the ice cream in the back of the freezer. It's going to melt anyway.

*Ditto on the beer. It's getting warm. For that matter eat every biscuit, cake, and piece of fruit in the house

*Go outside and start a roller skate circle in the intersection. Traffic's not moving anyway.

*Buy candles. Lots. Stage a scene from "Interview with a Vampire" over dinner.

*Or get glowsticks. Hold a mini-rave on the corner, providing your boombox has batteries.

*Replace your sonic electric toothbrush with the old-fashioned hand-crank kind.

*Fold and tape sheets of lined notebook paper into fans. Stand out on the street selling them for a dollar.

*Call your Congressperson and ask her/him to fund sustainable energy research -- after the electricity comes back on, that is.