I had a lot of nightmares as a kid. Thanks to these nightmares and various frightening films I’ve developed a hilarious set of OCD habits such as opening and closing closet doors before sleeping and checking behind the shower curtain before I saddle up to the toilet (you laugh but one day someone is gonna be in there and then who’s the dumb one!)

My imagination is easily inspired. For a while I couldn’t even watch a commercial for a horror movie because I knew those 30 seconds were enough to create an entire world of horrific fantasy that I’d be trapped inside for the rest of the evening. The one thing more unnerving then horror characters and sharks (I don’t swim in the ocean, at all, ever) is muppets.

Not all muppets, Kermit is fine, Fozzy, whatever. I’m talking about those LSD muppets that creators slip in films and TV shows, mixed with other cute, lovable creatures. They lure you in with Grover and then BAM, some abomination walks onto the screen that’s burned into your mind forever. Some horribly disfigured, warbly voiced monstrosity that may as well be drenched in blood, because thats how you’ll remember them, regardless.

Here’s five of the worst perpetrators.

5) Sesame Street’s Big Bad Wolf

He first appeared in a mock ‘News Report’ that Kermit was doing about the story of the 3 Little Pigs, but eventually was cast in a full time role in my brain as the monster that lived in the crawlspace behind our dryer. His nose and mouth are almost crocodilian in length, making him a hybrid death machine that can not only eat you whole, but smell (and enjoy) your fear.

4) Sesame Street’s Yip Yip Aliens

Who the f*ck invented these? I’ve seen like 3/4th’s of every science fiction movie ever and I’ve never observed a more frightening rendition of creatures from another planet. They have no body, and their circular mouths are contorted into a look of excruciating pain. The sound they omit — ‘Yip Yip‘ — over and over gives them an almost zombie-like demeanor. Incapable of love or communication, their race knows only war.

3) Skeksis from ‘The Dark Crystal’

Bird reptiles that appear to have some type of bizarre bone disease and turn infantile when they die/age. As someone who grew up around wild turkeys, the thought of gangs of intelligent, upright walking, violent minded birds hit very close to home.

2) The Rockbiter from ‘The Never-ending Story’

Could you have designed a more horribly disfigured face? My cousins would loop this scene and force me to watch it as a form of torture.

1) The Fiery Gang from ‘The Labyrinth’

A gang of forest dwelling, possible serial rapist apes who sing about ‘showing you a good time’ while removing their limbs and creating a gallery of horrifyingly twisted body shapes. Then they try to rip your head off, in an effort to make you more like them. Awesome, just awesome.

[Got any childhood fears induced by muppets? We want to know]

The US Military carried out an Air-strike on the central Somali town of Dusamareb on Wednesday Night killing al-Qaeda’s ‘top-commander in Somalia’. According to US officials Al-Shabab leader, Aden Hashi Ayro was inside the house leveled by the strike along with at least one of his top commanders.

A doctor at Dusamareb Hospital told the BBC that he was treating eight civilians, both women and children, for burns and shrapnel wounds. One of these women has since died.

According to the BBC, Al-Shabab, is a military wing of the Somali Sharia courts movement aka the Union of Islamic Courts. They were in power within Somalia until 2006 when they were overthrown by Ethiopian troops. Since then, the group has led the guerilla fight against the new Ethiopian-backed Somali government.

Over this past weekend, the two sides of the conflict engaged in heavy fighting, killing at least 81, and wounding 119 within the Somali capital of Mogadisu. According to Sudan Ali Ahmed, chairman of Elman Human Rights,

“The casualties … were caused by Ethiopians using heavy artillery and tank shells in residential areas of the war-torn capital.”

This attack is fifth known US strike against so-called operatives inside of Somalia. Past attacks have drawn heat from the international community, warning that the US is involving itself in a bloody internal civil war. These strikes have killed “terrorists” and civilians.

For more information on Somalia, check out my article on the Somalian civil war (ongoing since 1991) and my other article on pirates in Somalia.

In Other News:

In reaction to the latest scandal, the Chinese government is investigating thousands of factories suspected child slave labor. According to a Hong Kong newspaper, 167 children have already been “rescued” from their lives as slave laborers. It is not clear what the government plans to do with these children. If they are simply returned to their villages they are at high risk for once again being forced into similar situations.

18 US veterans commit suicide every day according to Arturo Gonzalez, a lawyer representing veterans’ groups who are lobbying the US government to provide better mental health care. Gonzalez, arguing his case before federal court Judge Samuel Conti, cited studies that found veterans committing suicide between three and 7.5 times more than the national average.

On a lighter note:

Good news for all of you future entrepreneurs! According to the New York Times, Universities across the country now offer classes to help fulfill your dreams, derailing past convention wisdom that “such skills cannot be learned in class”. More than 2,000 colleges and universities offer at least a class if not an entire course of study in entrepreneurship. In 1985, only 253 institutions offered such courses.

Albert Hofmann, the Scientist who accidentally discovered LSD, has died at the age of 102. During a laboratory experiment in 1943, a small quantity of a drug he was working on—the now infamous — lysergic acid diethylamide—fell onto his hand whereupon he began to experience,

“a not unpleasant intoxication-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination […] I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of color”.

He was wont to refer to LSD as “my problem child”.

See you tomorrow!

Three students at Bard College were arrested earlier this month for toting around a portable drug den.

Apparently, 2 freshmen, along with a sophomore buddy, were moving a bunch of drug paraphernalia in suitcases across campus when they were “spooked” by campus police and freaked out, one of them evidently diving into a bunch of bushes.

After the students were expelled from school, police searched their room and found quite a stash. “Nearly a pound of marijuana, half a kilogram of a partially refined but yet-unidentified hallucinogenic drug, hashish, hashish oil” and the remnants of “a portable drug-processing lab” were confiscated at the scene, causing all three students to rack up felony drug charges.

While I’m not surprised that something like this happened (1st of all, there are college drug dealers everywhere, and 2nd of all, this is Bard College. Smart hippies + campus in the middle of the woods = drug paradise), you gotta shake your head at the stupidity of ruining your life after being at an expensive private college for only two months.

With college acceptance rates lowering daily, admissions making it almost impossible to get in anywhere, and tuition forcing most of us to pay student loans until we’re 50, blowing a perfectly good college career (and future) after only 2 months of moving out of your parents home is redonkulous.

At least give yourself time to learn something before turning into a drug lord. Take a midterm. Go to a party. Befriend a professor. Realize where you are.

Anyone who would throw away such an expensive, once-in-a-life opportunity deserves to get caught.

…Especially if you’re dumb enough to carry your LSD lab across campus in a suitcase.