Imagine there’s no smartphones
It’s easy if you try
No apps to play with
Just Words with Friends you’re by.
Imagine all the people
With too much free time.

Imagine no TV shows
It isn’t hard to do
No news or ballgames
No Larry David, too.
Imagine all the people
Who can’t watch the VMAs?

Imagine there’s no Twitter,
I wonder if you can.
Nobody left to follow,
with no Kardashian.
Imagine all the people
Speaking in paragraphs!

(Oo-oo-ooo)

You may say I’m a dreamer
That the storm won’t really come
So go try and get power
I’ll be home and drinking rum.

So what’s there to do all weekend, if we can’t use technology? Our survival is at stake.

Get a Gadget Charger

XTG technology’s Premium Solar Charger can charge USB devices only by using the power of the sun. There’s also a built-in reading light, so even in a blackout, devices are ready to go.

Cook with a Solar-Powered Oven

This oven lets people make a home-cooked meal by using the sun’s rays. Pretty amazing. It’s pricey at $300, but a cool invention, nonetheless.

Stay Bright with a Wind-Up Flashlight

This flashlight gives off 20 minutes of light from one minute of winding it. Not a bad ratio, given the circumstances.

But what if you can’t afford any of these newfangled gadgets? You’ll still have roughly 48 hours to get through.  What then? Surely, there must be a solution. Here are a few more radical options.

Go Read Some Books

There’s this place in most towns where they hide all the books. It’s like jail for literature. I know. Weird. Most people don’t know about them. They sometimes have movies and CDs there too. You can usually give the books a temporary reprieve from their jail cell, but if you keep them out of jail for too long, the jail starts fining you money, since the books are overdue to get back to that cage where they belong. They even give the books an ugly plastic jacket that they have to wear, and they claim that it’s “for their protection”. But come on. It’s a scam. Let’s be honest. Anyway, if you want to make a visit to the jail and relieve a few of the books of their misery, that could be a way to get through the hurricane.

Play Board Games

This little tidbit has been lost over the annals of time, but believe it or not, it’s a fact: Words with Friends is actually based on a little-known board game called Scrabble, in which players would take ancient ceramic or wooden tiles and put them on a large, flat board to form words. The words would be combined in different combinations, and points would be awarded. Great fun was had by all in this storied game for an ancient generation. Other types of these ‘board games’ have also been known to exist, although their names have been lost in history to researchers over time. Sorry. (Oh, that’s one!)

Think of Conspiracy Theories about Steve Jobs

Like this one: What if Steve Jobs could actually see the future, and saw that the hurricane coming this weekend was actually going to destroy all technology as we know it? What if he wanted to retire on top, and have his stepping down be the final big tech news story to ever happen? Or this one: What if God was planning on giving everyone a nice late-August weekend, and then heard that Steve Jobs was resigning and thought “No!!!! Screw it, I’m throwing a hurricane at everyone!” As R-Truth would say, it’s a C-O-N-Spiracy!

Drink. Heavily.

Even the strongest longing for technology can be fixed with a little boozin’. Here’s a great recipe for a Hurricane.

Ingredients:

• 2 ounce dark rum
• 2 ounce white rum
• 2 ounce passion fruit
• 1 ounce orange juice
• ½ ounce lime juice
• 1 tablespoon simple syrup
• 1 tablespoon grenadine

Shake with ice. Strain into a hurricane glass (or any glass) over ice. Garnish with an orange slice and cherry.

Awesome! Thanks, Drinks app on my iPhone!

Crap. I’d better write that down on paper.