Triple Word Score

For Jessica's second entry into the Threadcakes competition, she picked a t-shirt which captures a unique emotion. It's a combination of frustration, hopelessness, and doom. Oddly enough, it happens when you're playing a game of Scrabble with your grandmother. If you've played the game, it's happened to you. You reach your hand into the bag and are left with no vowels, and the consonants which are hardly ever used in the English language. And this after is your grandmother just dropped "QUIZ" on the triple word score. See here for Jessica's complete entry into the contest.

Did you know that the highest possible scoring word you can make in scrabble is "oxyphenbutazone", which is worths something like 1780 points? In case you're curious, oxyphebutazone is a metabolite of anti-inflammatory drugs given to people with arthritis. Chemistry, for the win!

Alcohol at a Party

Time for a little competition. Jessica decided to enter the cake competition put on by the t-shirt website Threadless. The competition is called Threadcakes. I had never heard of the company until our friend Chelsea mentioned they were having a cake competiton. The basic idea of the competition is to design a cake based off one of their t-shirts. Being a graduate student, I have a tender spot in my nerdy heart for chemistry. So I recommended she make a cake of the "Introduction to Molecular Bonding" shirt. She was even nice enough to get me the shirt! You can also check out her full entry on the Threadcakes website.

Bears a close resemblance to the shirt, no?

Awww, snap!

How cute, sharing a beer bong.

I thought this depiction of two atoms sharing an electron was necessary. Although, wouldn't it be an ionic bond as shown above? Eh, no matter........(actually, it is matter)...NEVERMIND!

One of the best parts of this cake was getting to crack open a beer at 10 in the morning so she could get that "beer color" just right.

Not only was this Jessica's first cake entered into a competition, it was also her first organic cake (that's the last chemistry joke).