Red, yellow, orange, mauve, chartreuse. Readers — are you, too, having trouble color-coordinating your daily panic level with the government’s ever-shifting terror iconography?

To help keep you on track, some wit has created a little app for the Mac OS called “Homeland Alert” — which monitors the current warning level and displays it on your desktop. You can download it here, but be warned — apparently it doesn’t actually, uh, work. As one reviewer wrote:

The first time I downloaded it I waited about 4 weeks and it did not change once from “Guarded” or blue, not even when we were at the “Elevated” level. We could have been attacked by terrorists and I would have never known!

I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in New York this season … red is the new blue.

(Thanks again to Memepool for this one! And hey — for more fun terror-monitoring equipment, check the awesome comment posted to this item by Howard Sherman.)