Given signs of an impending ban on incandescents, I promptly laid in a large stash of the 100 watt incandescent bulbs I prefer, probably a more-than-lifetime supply given my age. I won't use compact fluorescents: being by education a chemist, I know better than to introduce mercury into living space, esp. in the form of a gadget that regularly gets broken.

[I should add that notwithstanding my concerns, I tried out compact fluorescents once. I found the light quality was unusably bad, far worse than any normal fluorescent tube. So much for Chinese attention to quality, once again. I returned the bulbs to Home Depot as unusable for my purposes.]

Mercury really is a very dangerous material, and as another reply pointed out, its compounds are often much more poisonous than the elemental form. Some years ago a chemist at, iirc, Dartmouth College got a single small drop of methyl mercury on her skin and ended up dying a slow and horrible death in consequence.

Dental fillings: the silver-mercury amalgam dentists use is essentially an intermetallic compound of great stability, though I believe crematoria have issues with mercury in their flue gases.

I'm waiting for the local earth mother brigade to discover the bandwagon they hopped on has a downside: huge decontamination costs if you break a compact fluorescent bulb in a carpeted area.

Why is there no "bright idea" icon in the form of a light bulb? A haloed Ballmer will have to do.