Monday 13th August is International Left-Handers' Day when we celebrate all the great things about being left-handed and raise awareness of the some of the challenges we face in a right-handed world. To find out a lot more about the Day, have a look at our special Left-Handers' Day website. We have also produced a page about How to celebrate the Day where you will find lots of ideas including things like: Downloading the free posters we have produced for you to create your own Lefty Zone Encouraging right-handers to try various activities using their left hand so they can see how difficult it is for us to use some of their tools and implements.

Also, don't forget to...

• Try our Left Handed Quiz and win a prize from our left-handed selection.
  
  
• Identify the Famous Left-Handers on the website for another chance at a prize
  
  
• Listen to the Lefties Lament song - Ian Radburn's brilliant lyrics always make us laugh!

Use this link to see our full list of ideas

As usual, there has been huge media interest in Left-Handers' Day and Keith and Lauren have already done pre-recorded interviews for programmes in Australia, America and Norway and are doing lots of live interviews on The Day, including BBC TV World News, Sky News and more than 40 regional radio stations. There are also sure to be many press and magazine articles so watch out for Left-handers Day reports in your area.

More than 30% of left-handers feel they are disadvantaged in some way in their workplace directly because of their handedness. On the other hand (!), 16% thought that as a left-handers they had definite advantages.

This seems to be supported by the fact that there are more left-handers than average in areas like Information Technology where we think we have an advantage and less in administrative and manual roles where the tools and equipment have more of an impact and can provide challenges for us lefties. There has been a lot of media interest in our survey and over 1,000 Club Members have completed the short survey form since our last newsletter. We want to get as big a sample as possible to update our results so please do contribute by letting us know about your work, sports or social groups.

Use this link to complete the survey

We have had a lot of feedback about the page translations on the site and thank you for all your contributions. We are aware that the machine translation is far from perfect but it does give access to our information to non-English speaking members and visitors and will also help the site be found in non-English search engines and other online directories.

Thank you to the members who have offered to provide more accurate translations of some pages and we will be working to see if we can complete some of them. Difficulties arise when we make changes or add new content and need to re-translate and also with mixing the manual and automatic translation pages. Overall, we have had a positive response to this new feature and we will continue to improve it as best we can.

If you are interested in the translation software we are using you can
find out about the Website Translator package here.

It's been an exciting week, with the announcement that researchers at Oxford University have discovered a gene for left-handedness. This led to a surge of requests for comment from the LHC by newspaper and radio journalists in the UK.

An international group of scientists, led by a team from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, have discovered a gene that increases the chance of being left handed. The study is published on-line by the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

This exciting development in genetic research, which involved over 40 scientists from 20 research centres around the world, revealed a gene called LRRTM1; the first to be discovered which has an effect on handedness. Although little is known about LRRTM1, the Oxford team suspects that it modifies the development of asymmetry in the human brain. The Left-Handers Club welcome these new findings, as a genetic link has long been considered the most likely cause of left-handedness yet a specific gene has until now remained elusive.

See more details and link to the full report here

There was a lot of interest in the Golf DVDs and Simple Swing eBook but I made a big mess-up and did not put in the special link to the 2 for 1 DVDs offer I have agreed with David Nevogt - sorry if it caused any confusion.

You can see the original article in last month's newsletter and the correct links are now shown below:

Click here for more information about the book and DVDs Don't buy the DVDs from the links on that page! Click this link to take advantage of the 2 for 1 offer that Keith has arranged - just order the Full Swing DVD and get the Short Game, Driver or Putting DVD free of charge.

Our previous videos on scissors and cutting and writing left-handed have proved very popular so we have spent a lot more time producing videos covering most other items we can think of. The editing has just been completed and we have divided the products into three videos.

• Stationery items, covering pens, scissors, rulers, notepads, pencils, pencil sharpeners and playing cards. (3 mins)
  
  
• Personal items and tools, covering conference folders and files, purses, wallets, watches, boomerangs, craft and safety knives, tape measures, pruners, edging shears, sickle (4 mins)
  
  
• Kitchen equipment, demonstrating bread knives, cutlery, tin openers, JarSpoon, corkscrews, peelers, zesters (5 mins)

Use this link to see the videos

We hope you enjoy the videos and that they may help explain why you find some things more difficult than right-handers. Watch out for Keith throwing the left-handed boomerang!

We want to give all Club Members a nice bonus for Left-Handers Day, so if our new videos have shown you any items that you now know you really need, you can order them at 20% off normal prices until the end of August 2007. This applies to all Anything Left-Handed products including all junior and school products so you can be well prepared for the new school year.

Just enter promotion code LHC2 (in capitals, no spaces) when you are placing your order and you will see the discount calculated in your shopping cart (use the box at left of all shop pages or the one in the shopping basket after you have added an item).

As always, delivery cost is only £3.50 (USD 6.80) anywhere in the world, or add other items to make your order over £30.00 (USD 58.50 and get free delivery worldwide) and the normal guarantee applies - if you try any of the products and are not absolutely delighted, you can return them for a full refund including postage. Click here to visit the Anything Left-Handed online store

That's all for this month - we will be in touch again soon

Best wishes

Keith & Lauren Milsom 
and all at the Left Handers Club

www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk
keith@anythingleft-handed.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 8770 3722
Fax: +44 (0)20 8715 1220

P. S. If you like what we are doing at the Left- Handers Club, please tell your family and friends about us so they can benefit as well
www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/recommend.html