Books & Beer x #SGTipsyTrivia! (Sat, 2 Nov at Switch by Timbre)

Mon, 7 Oct 2013
2 min read
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Books & Beer x SGTipsyTrivia!

Who were Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell? What is the Teenage Textbook? And am I the only one who cares about such matters of grave importance?

If questions like these keep you up at night, then come on down to Switch by Timbre on Sat, 2 Nov 2013 at 5pm for a fun-filled evening of Books & Beer x SGTipsyTrivia!

Join us as Singapore’s first travelling book swop with an icy-cold twist meets Singapore’s first travelling pub quiz with a local focus at this year’s Singapore Writers’ Festival.

In this edition, the book exchange will feature a literary pub quiz with questions on luminaries such as William Shakespeare and Goh Poh Seng. Bring friends, or meet like-minded people there!

So come thirsty and come prepared – because, really, how much fun can you get up to along Bras Basah Road on a Saturday night?

Books & Beer x SGTipsyTrivia!
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2013
Time: 5pm – 7pm
Venue: Switch by Timbre
(73 Bras Basah Road #01-01/02, Singapore, Singapore 189556)

Price:
Book Swop – No charge
Pub Quiz – $5 per player (max. 6 players per team.
Teams with more than 6 players will have 3.5 points deducted per extra player.)

Top Prize for Pub Quiz: 60% of evening’s pot
Second Prize for Pub Quiz: 30% of evening’s pot

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PSA: In white and blue (Part II)

Mon, 16 Sep 2013
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The old St Gabriel's School Badge

In a strange twist of fate, my teaching career has come full circle and I’ll be relief teaching at St Gabriel’s Secondary School from today till the end of Term 4.

Pretty excited because I’ll be teaching The Chrysalids by John Wyndham and Boom by Jean Tay.

I’ll also have to teach some English language classes, but thankfully it’s the old syllabus (I heard the new one is… complex).

In somewhat-related news, I’m trying to find a high-resolution version of the school badge you see above (the original and the one I used to wear).

The original motto was “Virtue and Truth” (or “Virtus et Veritas” in Latin, though it was never used as such); the present motto is “Labore Omnia Vincit” (or “Hard Work Conquers All”).

I still prefer the old motto and badge.

Stuff you must read today (Fri, 13 Sep 2013) – The Literary Edition

Fri, 13 Sep 2013
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  • David Ferry’s Beautiful Thefts | The New Yorker
    “One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable”.

  • Poet’s Kinship With the President | The New York Times
    “‘Richard was always a complete engineer within poetry,’ Professor McGrath said. ‘If you said it needs a little work here or there, a whole transfiguration of a poem emerged. He understood revision not to be just a touch-up job but a complete reimagining, a reworking. I know that’s connected to his engineering skill.'”

  • The pun conundrum | BBC News
    “The late William Safire, the New York Times’s long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun ‘is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay – a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure'”.

  • Samuel Beckett meets the Teletubbies | Improbable Research
    A possible reason why the Teletubbies always had that element of “[n]othing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”.

  • “Jane Austen, Game Theorist”: Full Transcript | Freakonomics
    “…in Pride And Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is not a very sympathetic character, and she seems to be very foolish. But if you look at what she accomplishes it’s pretty good. She gets Jane married and she even sort of incentivizes Lydia…the younger sister, who in a very sort of crisis-y kind of way…runs off with Wigham without being married, which is a scandal. But I argue in the book that maybe she does that because she realizes the only way she can get some money in her marriage is to marry somebody who is not necessarily super committed to her…to create [a] crisis situation so the richer members of her family will then solve the problem for her. And that’s what happens”.