Left Handers Club Newsletter – October 2009

1. Music and lefthanders

We seem to have started a very lively debate about music and left-handed guitars in particular – thank you to everyone who has participated and added their thoughts and advice.  You can see the pages with all the member comments here:

Left handed guitar

Left handers and wind instruments

Other instruments

The conversation continues so please do add your own thoughts and responses to the comments that are already there.

We have been searching the various music suppliers we have found for other left-handed instruments and noticed that ActiveMusician stock a wide range of left handed sitars – click here to see the range in our USA Partner Store.   Does anyone know why there would be so many sitars for left-handers?

If you are aware of any other specialist left-handed instruments and suppliers, please do let us know and we will add them to our resources list.

2. Your Left Handed Child Book

3. Left handed business club feedback

We have had some good feedback from members offering resources to help others and saying that they would love to be involved in a group of like-minded lefty business people, but it has not been a large response so we are going to let that one run a bit longer before we decide what we can do to help people get together.

Click here to see our full information page and contribute your ideas

4. 2010 Left Handers Calendar

Keith has once again produced the “backwards” calendar running from right to left as a lot of people seem to enjoy it and have been asking when it will be ready again.

We produce it in a very simple format so you can download it, print and stick onto your preferred background. If we have any design geniuses out there who can do a better job of it I would be interested to see your work and could make a gallery of calendars available for download if you send them in. 
Click here to use the contact form and you can attach a file as well.     

Use this link to download the 2010 calendar as an Adobe.pdf format file 
(you can open it with the free  Adobe Reader)
Use this link to download it as a .jpg graphic file 

You may need to Right click the link then choose “Save target as…” or “Save link as…” then you can choose the location to save the file to on your computer.

We still have some stock left of the 2010 desk diary and block calendar – use the links below to get more information or place your order before they all go.

2010 Desk diary (spiral bound on the right)

2010 block calendar (one tear-off sheet per day)

5. Left Handers and Sport

It is often stated that sport is a prime example of left-handers superiority, but what are the reasons behind this theory?

The “leftie advantage” seems to emerge in sports demanding rapid reactions and good spatial judgement. When some research was conducted, 7 of the 16 top world fencers were left-handed, and so were 5 of the top 25 international tennis players and 4 of Europe’s ten best table tennis payers. In boxing, squash and cricket left-handers also enjoy more than average success. Among the scientists who have studied left-handedness in sport one in particular, a French neuroscientist named Guy Azemar, investigated the proportion of left-handers in world-class championships over several years. He reported that about a third of elite fencers are left-handed.

Click here to see our full article on left-handers in various sports and some examples of views and comments we have received by email about lefties and sport.

We are very interested to hear your views and experiences of playing your sports left-handed and any advantages, disadvantages, equipment challenges etc, that you have come across so please do add your comments to the article.

We are also working on a resource list for left-handed sports equipment so if you are aware of sports where special equipment is required for lefties and know where to get it, please add that as well and we will pull it all together.

6. Are you a good writer?

Whenever we put up a feature about some aspect of left-handedness, we usually get a big response from people offering their opinions and advice and we often think it would be nice to pull it all together into a new article or booklet that would be easier for people to read than just working their way through all the comments.

We could do with some help on this and are looking for Members who have the ability to sift through all the content and comments on subjects they are familiar with and convert it into an easily readable article that we can post on the site.  We are also setting up systems where people with expertise on a certain subject could be given access to parts of the site so that they could moderate comments, give feedback to people and add more information as it comes up.

If that is you, please get in touch and we can give it a try.  Click here to complete the web content contact form that goes to Keith – please tell us a bit about yourself and your area of expertise. 

7. Christmas is coming!

It’s that time of year again and we can help with great gift ideas for your lefty friends and family.  Have a look at our page of videos about left-handed products to see if it gives you any inspiration and we are very interested to know about any gifts you have given or received that you were particularly pleased with.

We are working on the Christmas Gifts section of our shop and will be putting together some special offers for members and we’ll be sending another newsletter about that later this month.