I've come up with an easy method for determining the Awesomeness-Level of co-workers (or any other group that you frequently associate with).

It's quite simple – here's how!

Figure out approximately how many people you can have real conversations with. By "real" I mean: things that you're mutually interested in, things that one of you are interested in but the other person doesn't keep thinking to themselves "lalala don't care, are you done talking yet", and random things like zombie invasions…… Actually, scratch all that – just figure out how many people you can talk to about zombie invasions.

I estimate that I can carry on a conversation about zombie invasions with 10% of my co-workers, which gives my co-workers an Awesomeness-Level of 10. If I do the same with my friends, they end up with an Awesomeness-Level of about 85.

See! Incredibly easy and highly accurate! Obviously this entire metric gets skewed when we're actually in the middle of a zombie invasion, but when that time comes, I'll broadcast a new system on all emergency radio frequencies.

I'm looking for ideas for brightening up the situation regarding this darn swine flu that I can't stop hearing about. Here are a couple of things that I've come up with:

1) Relabel maps that show the spread of swine flu with titles like "Places Where People Weren't Taught How To Was Their Hands", or "Progression Of Zombie Apocalypse".

2) Pretend that confirmed cases of swine flu are actually confirmed cases of zombie threat. Remember, they can only be stopped by removing the head, or destroying the brain!