| In high-Tc cuprates, the applicability of such simple notions as "metal" and "insulator" is rather ambiguous: On one hand, cuprates show "metallic" behavior with unusually large resistivity at high temperatures ("bad metal" behavior), while an "insulating" behavior has been found in samples whose resistivity would normally correspond to a metal, when the superconductivity is suppressed by high magnetic fields. It is gradually recognized in recent years that these unusual transport properties are likely to be a result of some sort of electron self-organization, which can be in the form of charge stripes or hole-pair checkerboards. In this talk, I present some of the most peculiar features in the transport properties of the cuprates [such as the log(1/T) resistivity divergence, anomalous resistivity anisotropy, metal-insulator crossover hidden under the "dome" of superconductivity, etc.] and discuss how these peculiarities are understood as manifestations of an electron self-organization. |