Monday Hangovers

• The neverending holiday has ended. Let all rejoice and drink champagne once the exhaustion has passed.
• I keep forgetting to mention that Scott is now a NYT-approved expert on dogs chewing off faces… or something like that. He extracts the goods for you. Also, Uglies, the book that made him such, made Amazon’s top 10 books for teens. (And Looking for Alaska’s on there too; although, the lack of Valiant is truly scandalous.)
• Relatedly, possible record prime number found.
• Good luck to Didi on his new (ad)ventures. (Scroll down.)
• A little Factsheet Five post at the Esoteric Science Resource Center.
• Another fabulous recipe care of Mr. McLaren, cookies with bourbon. (We have had far too many sweets here at Casa Bond/Rowe, and yet still we immediately devoured chocolates sent by friends as soon as we got home.)
• More MFA talk: Maud has an excellent post excerpting David Hollander in the most recent issue of Poets and Writers on what MFA programs are not looking for (reductively put: in his opinion, writers who knock your socks off need not apply). See also: Maud on Caitlin Flanagan and the inner housewife.
• Holtzbrink, the overlords of Tor, Picador, St. Martin’s and others, have launched a blog and lots of other goodies. Check it out.
• Matt Cheney at Emerald City on "Literary Fiction for People Who Hate Literary Fiction."
• Jeff reveals the ugly truth that Christmas is really all about hippies.
• For full contact sport enthusiasts, Miss Snark is critiquing synopses submitted by her readers. In the response to the first one, she says: The purpose of a synopsis for an agent is, in the words of Lucienne Diver "to make sure aliens don’t arrive on the farm in chapter 14". However, that’s not the writer’s purpose for a synopsis. A synopsis for a writer is part of your arsenal of persuasion. Yes, you write a capsule of the novel but you also make it enticing. You want an agent to read this and think "oh yes I want to read this".