There's a great desk diary designed especially for left handers that you can buy from Anything Left-Handed.
There are planning pages on the left side of each weekly spread, with interesting facts about left-handedness on the right hand side. The diary also lists the birthdays of famous left-handed people.
Even the printing is reversed, so that it opens from left to right. Buy your 2009 left-handed diary.
Apparently, people who throw balls with their left hands, use their left eyes to look through peepholes and place their left ears against the wall to eavesdrop on conversations are twice as good at problem-solving and have wider vocabularies than their right-handed peers. But we're also more forgetful.
Take a look at the full story on this blog....
If you like to read calendars from right to left, then here's one you can download for free:
I saw on Anything LeftHanded's site the other day that Will Aspinall, who makes documentaries for the BBC and the Discovery Channel, is making a film about the experience of left-handers in modern combat.
He is looking for people who:
Yvette Stanton is an Australian embroidery designer who is currently working on a left-handed stitch dictionary.
If you happen to be an embroiderer, she is asking for requests: what stitches do you as a left-hander, particularly want instructions for? If you are a needlework teacher, what stitches would you really like left-handed instructions for your left-handed students?
So far she has had requests for the following embroidery stitches: french knots, colonial knots, ladder stitch and plaited braid stitch. The dictionary will have simple stitches, right through to much more difficult stitches, all diagrammed step-by-step, with accompanying written instructions and photographs.
Simply leave a comment for Yvette with your stitch request on her blog:
http://white-threads.blogspot.com/2008/12/left-handed-stitch-instructions.html
That may seem a strange title coming from someone who is a southpaw but it doesn't refer to me. It's the name of an Irish band. Out of curiosity, I emailed them to find out why they had chosen this name and Kathryn Williams (one of the band members) kindly sent me this reply:
"To begin with, I grew up in a small town in Ireland. I went to an old Catholic school and some of the older nuns there believed very firmly in things that many people didn't. When I was 4, no-one in my class was actually allowed to be left-handed - we were all told we had to write with our right hand. (Luckily I had a very sweet lady who taught me when I was 5 who said we could colour in with any hand we liked, but it definitely made an impression) The band name is a throw back to that year of my life.
The more we thought about it, left-handed people still seemed to have a certain reputation. They're the creative types, they're artistic, they're musicians... We felt that, even though we were musicians, we didn't fit into the artistic/creative bag. We play because we enjoy it, but you couldn't define any of us because of it.
And finally, I have to presume that everyone has seen this sword fight at some point in their lives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3gfFVmw0kA It was my favourite film when I was a kid, and the bass player and I bonded over memories of this movie when we first worked together. It's such a brilliant moment, how could we not name the band after it?"
Thanks to Kathryn for taking the trouble to reply ot me. Here is the band's website: http://www.iamnotlefthanded.com They are playing in Scotland at the moment:
10 Dec 08 - Pivo Pivo, Glasgow
11 Dec 08 - Paisley Student Union, Paisley
13 Dec 08 - The Forest Cafe, Edinburgh
14 Dec 08 - The Tunnels, Aberdeen
Following hot on the heels of a study that said left-handed men earn more than right handers, another study (this time from the University of Bristol) claims that left-handed children perform less well in tests compared to their right handed counterparts.
They based their findings on national curriculum test results (Sats) and IQ tests of over 10,000 children.
Hmmm. When I was at junior school, I was always in the top one to three in my class. And one of the other two was a left hander. So I take these studies with a generous pinch of salt. Anyhow, here's where you can read about the left handed study.
There was a great story in the Daily Mail yesterday. Apparently, left-handed men earn 5% more than right handers. A study undertaken by academics at University College, Dublin studied 18,000 people in their 30s and 40s and found that left-handed men earned £1,112 more a year (or 5%) than their right-handed counterparts. Read the full story about left handers earning more.
Interestingly, this contradicts another study carried out by Johns Hopkins University in the States which I wrote about in earlier this year. This study concluded that left-handed men who attended college for at least a year earn 13% more than right-handed men. And those who completed four years at college earn, on average, 21% more than similarly educated right-handed men.
So, who do you believe?
