wooden fireplace

Something that's completely unusable or effectively useless.

Something as useful as a chocolate teapot.

The phrase "eight people in a basement, huddled around a wooden fireplace" during a power failure originates with the Brockville Recorder & Times, a small-city daily newspaper, reporting on a major icestorm which hit eastern Ontario in Jan 1998. They followed up with another piece on a subsequent power fail which stated "when the insulator is open, the electricity leaks to the ground."

Don't quit your day jobs, kids.