“All Nighters” is a New York Times blog series about insomnia–how it’s lived, what to do about it. Cartoonist Roz Chast recommends playing some individual Scattegories, “The A to Z Cure“:
One thing I do when I can’t sleep is play alphabet games. I try to list various things from A to Z: countries, rock groups, prescription drugs, movies, books, celebrities whose first and last names begin with the same letter… you get the idea. I don’t mind repeating categories from one night to another. Diseases might seem to be an unlikely insomnia game category, but for some reason, it’s one of my favorites. I like to combine ailments that terrified me in childhood (lockjaw) with ones that I didn’t know about until I was an adult (Ebola). And there are certain ailments that are never, ever on the list. Ever.
Illustrated on the site.