Let's silylate!
I am sorry for a long absence. First, I was away from the internet, then I was doing what most people here would do on May holidays (I can feel your smile and can see your lips whispering the words "vodka" and "bears"). :) Recently we reanimated the oldest Unreal Tournament, so I've been playing like crazy till 4 AM and now I'm here. Let's get back to some chemistry?
If you like to silylate everything you put your eye on, you might be a good friend of our good old Sema L. Ioffe[1] and Scott E. Denmark. I happened to talk with the former about his research. I just wanted to point out a couple of reactions with very unobvious mechanisms. Repotedly, Albert Eschenmoser of ETH Zürich failed to come up with a mechanism for the first reaction, but he quickly succeeded with the second. Any thoughts?
When there are so many possible reaction pathways, you get used to discover a pyrrolidine and a pyrrole together in the products of Ni-Ra reduction of some 1,2-oxazine, change one substituent and get a furan, change another and get something else. Take a look! The first author is my classmate. There are prerequisites that he might receive a PhD (usually - 3 years here) while some of us will still be undergrads - he's defending his diploma thesis now, after 4 years of study instead of regular 5.5 or 5.
[1] - see, for example, a review on C-C bond formation mediated by silicon Lewis acids, written with Alexander Dilman who teaches us advanced organic synthesis with William A. Smit, one of the authors of "Organic Synthesis: The Science behind the Art". It is a must read for everyone who's ever asked "Why organic synthesis?"