From Matt:

Stupidest line in a science article I have ever read:

“But few scientists have tried to see whether bats have a discernible influence on insect populations. Further, because bats fly around at night, scientists sometimes forget about them entirely.”

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Just like cops sometimes forget about robbers!

McCarron got creative on request today, and the result is a beautiful thing to behold:

Two weekends ago, I went to a wedding in a small town outside of Atlanta from which I am still recovering. The groom of honor was Nathan, one of my close friends and roommates from college. I had been looking to this weekend for a long time, because it was an opportunity to see a bunch of friends from college who I hadn’t seen in a long time.

I flew into Atlanta on Friday and met Sarah at the airport. Sarah has had a crazy couple of weeks of globe-trotting adventures. She was in New York for the previous week and a half, then she flew to Atlanta for the wedding, and after that, she flew back to New York for another couple of days.

Our planes got in around 4:30. We picked up our rental car and drove for 2 hours to get to Washington, Georgia, where we had a room at the Hotel Fitzpatrick. Sarah immediately asked the man at the front desk if there were ghosts in the hotel. Sometimes I think she has ghosts on the brain. The man said there were ghosts in the hotel, but as we learned over the course of the weekend, there are ghosts in pretty much every building in Washington, Georgia. The town is off-the-charts with spectral activity.

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My sister Mandy and her husband Mark are trying to teach their 2 year-old daughter, Lexi, how to sleep in a big kids’ bed. I don’t question their determination, but I do question their sanity. Mark talks about the experience on his blog (my family is very modern … instead of talking, we just blog at each other):

I went upstairs to see how it was going and just in time…Mandy was getting tired of dealing with the girl. I take a different approach and lay down on the bed with her. She’s good for about 10 seconds, then she reaches over, grabs my nose and says, “Honk honk”. It’s very hard not to laugh when you know you shouldn’t encourage her.

On that note, my sister commented awhile ago that the only picture I’ve posted of my nephew is one in which he bears an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill. He is starting to fill out in his old age, and she suggested that I update the pictures for the three people who read my blog and may be interested in looking at pictures of adorable children who in no way resemble fat, alcoholic former Prime Ministers.

Noah.

For good measure, here’s Lexi. I believe her t-shirt reads “I’m the kitty. Meeeoowww.”

This is my future sister-in-law. Julia, that is.

Oh, did I mention I’m getting married?

My good friend Josh now has a blog about newspaper photography. It’s pretty fascinating, and his pictures are intensely great. Learn from the master!

From an email by my friend Matt:

Here is how I know I’m back in New York, dude:

1. I walk into a 50’s-70’s furniture store on Ludlow. They have an Alf phone on sale for $175.

2. Dude in the middle of 42nd Street, apparently not finding any cabs, yelling, “this is SILLY! This is just so fucking SILLY! So goddamned SILLY!”

I did a Google search today for “Dinsmore,” after looking at my stats and seeing that a few people came to my blog from that keyword. I don’t show up until page 18, which is pretty sad to me, especially considering that I’ve written two books. If you do a search for “Jeffrey Dinsmore” I’m way up there, but c’mon. That’s really stacking the deck.

Coming in much higher than me on the Google list is my dad’s company, The Dinsmore Group. He’s all the way up on page 4. But perhaps most impressive is my grandpa, who is the NUMBER TWO DINSMORE IN THE WORLD, right behind some law firm. My grandpa is a very smart man. He invented the sensor that got him the distinction of #2 Dinsmore. He has explained to me what it does before, but not being a technically-minded person, I don’t really get it. All I know is that it must be pretty darned important if it has made him the #2 Dinsmore in the world.

Read Part 1 of my trip to Flagstaff here.

Day three of my exciting adventure in Flagstaff began on a somber note, as we awoke to find the bear had finally given up the ghost.

A few hours later she would be nothing but a leg.

But this was not our concern, as Josh, Ginny and I were headed to the lava tube. Tucked away discreetly in a random Flagstaff forest is the stone entrance to a cave that was once a conduit for molten hot lava. I had seen a picture the day before at Josh’s newspaper and decided that I had to go to it. Little did I know that inside the lava tube, I would discover a painful secret about myself, a secret that’s so explosive and shocking, I must hide it on the next page.

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In writing the post below, I went to check out my friend Chris Cassidy’s website and stumbled across these amazing portraits of boxers he recently shot. Photography amazes me. How do good photographers capture the personalities of their subjects? When I take a picture, I can capture exactly two different looks: “Phony Smile” or “Eyes Closed.”