The Left Handers Blog

Right handed people for the most part probabily think that some crazy left handed person decided that people showed wear a ring on the third finger on the left hand. Many left handed people know that there is no way a left handed person created this tradition. Wearing a ring on your dominant hand is cumbersome and hazardous.

If you are a right handed person and never have worn a ring on your dominant hand give it a try. See how much if affects what you are trying to accomplish. Here are a few things to try doing: swing a hammer, throw a ball or grab onto a chain and pull. I”m recently married (almost 2 years) and still I”m finding new ways to lose, or damage my wedding ring. Last winter I was out throwing football as snow flurries were falling. After a couple minutes my hands were as cold as ice. When I went to throw the football my ring went flying off my finger and on to the yard. That is just one of many examples that right handed people don”t have to worry about.

I decided to look up why we wear our wedding rings on our left hands. This tradition turns out to have been started somewhere around 300 BC when people believed that a vein of blood ran directly from the third finger on the left hand to the heart. According to wikipedia “because of the hand-heart connection, people named the putative vein descriptively vena amori, Latin for ”the vein of love”. Due to this tradition, it became acceptable to wear the wedding ring on this finger.” Years later when the circulatory system was discovered this idea was proven wrong but yet the tradition continued on.

Another interesting note about wearing wedding rings on the left hand is that in countries like Chile, Germany, and some other Eastern European countries wear their wedding rings on the right hand.

So for the record, wedding rings were not an idea of a left handed person.

Now this is interesting I found out that Dick’s Sporting Good’’s has a Left Handed Shop on their web site. Here check it out yourself

To get to the Left Handed Golf Shop from Dick’’s Sporting Goods home page click on Golf, and in the SHOP MORE section Left Handed Shop is listed right under NEW ARRIVALS!! So their lefty shop is pretty important.

I”m not a golfer by any chance but I still thought this was pretty cool that a big online and in real life has a left handed shop. I wonder if they have a section like this in the actual stores. I’ll have to check it out.

http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/sm-left-handed-shop–ci-714758_cp-714659.html

The recently released next generation gaming console from Nintendo which has been all over the news lately and is currently sold out of all major retailers is a left hand friendly gaming console. In most gaming consoles it isn’t a big deal if the controller is right hand domaint because the controllers are so simple. With Nintendo’s new system they introduced a completely new way to control a video game.

This weekend I had the chance to play Wii Sports the game that comes free with every Wii sold in North America, tennis is one of the games in the pack. For the main Wii user interface, you can create a little character called a mii, this character is then used in each of the sports games. One of the features you can choose while creating your player is what hand you use to play each sport. For tennis I hold the racket with my left hand so I picked left handed.

As you can see in the picture to the right, the Wii controller comes in two pieces, note that only the right piece is used in tennis. You swing that piece as if it was the tennis racket handle. Since I told it I was left handed my mii character was shown holding the racket in the left hand and when I swung a forehand my character swung a forehand, too. Good thing Nintendo added this feature because if there wasn’t a left handed option this system would almost be unplayable by left handed people. Wii tennis does not work well when a left handed person tries playing a right handed mii character.

Hopefully other Wii games will also have the left handed / right handed option as seen in Wii Sports. I will try to find out soon. It would be a horrible shame if sword fighting games like Red Steel or Zelda do not have the option. Imagine slashing a sword with your left hand and seeing the on screen display hold the sword with the right hand and swing in the opposite direction.

Has anyone played any of the other Wii games to see if they are left hand friendly? Post a comment if you have, please.

Baltimore Sun Newspaper recently wrote an article about us lefties in sports, called “Some lefties do all right”. As usual the title of the article is negative. It’s a good read, though and offers a decent history of left handed athletes. The article covers all majors sports, here in the states. Has some interesting stories about famous athletes like Golfer Phil Mickelson (who isn’t left handed outside of golf), basketball player Bill Russell, and current left handed quarterbacks Mark Brunell, & Chris Simms.

Here are some quotes:

“Apparently, if you want to become a conqueror, it’s good to be left-handed. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon were. But in most other fields, it’’s not a big advantage.”

Maybe if we all get together and start our own country we’ll be able to conqueror the whole world, and not just parts of it like those mentioned above.

”Left-handers get their revenge as batters,” wrote George Will in his book Men at Work. ”At the plate, they stand a step closer to first and the momentum of their swing causes them to uncoil moving toward first. As a result, the average left-hander among today’s major leaguers gets there a second faster than the average right-hander.”

Having not played much baseball as a kid, because of being slightly ambitextrous and therefore confussed I never realized the advantage I had if I would of batted left handed.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/football/bal-sp.lefties16nov16,0,6277948.story?coll=bal-sports-football

If you are a lefty you already know what I”m talking about. For those right handed people next time you go home, or encounter a door knob open it with your left hand. WARNING: Be careful not to smash your knuckles against the surrounding wall and make sure you don’t turn yourself completely around and be facing the outside again in our attempt to open the door all the way. Household doors are designed to be opened with the right hand. From the way they open to the location of the door knob.

Being left handed I naturally reach out my left hand to do things. When it comes to double doors, the ones that you pull to enter and push to leave and are found in places of business, I always find myself using the opposite side of everyone else. Sometimes doing this causes a traffic jam with all the other people coming and leaving. I do this because when I enter a store I reach for the door’s handle and grab the one on the left, I swing it open away from my body. That door I come in from is the same one that all the right handed people exit from because they use their right hand to open the door in front of them.

Opening a door is another task left handed have to learn to use with their right hand.

OK, so I was watching ESPN’s Sportcenter this morning and they did a special on the Seattle Seahawks. They were saying how the Seahawk’s Shaun Alexander runs backwards. I had no idea what they were talking about so I kept watching. Turns out that their reference to Alexander running backwards was ESPN
announcers refering to how he always runs to the left.

Seattle has been known this season for flipping their “strong” side of the offense to the left, instead of the right and they are claiming it as the reason for a lot of their success. The segment on Sportscenter went on to explain how for years the NFL has been a right hand/side dominated game. Every team lines up their offense to have more players off to the right side of the ball. Mostly for run blocking and because most quarterbacks are right handed so they tend to run towards their right. What Seattle has done is make their offense’s strong side the left and it’s caused a lot of defenses problems this year. The team may have done this because their star runningback Shaun Alexander is left handed, what ever it is it sure has benefited the team. Every team that faces the Seahawks knows they are going to run to the left, they just can”t stop it.

During the Sportscenter segment every other time they refered to the word “left” they used one of it’s negative terms such as “backwards”, “weak” and even as the “wrong side”. This is just another example of how this right handed world is against us!

Today as I was using a video camera at my church. I thought that the Canon XL-1 just like every other video camera I’ve ever used is a right handed piece of technology. This is because the zoom controls and the hand strap are on the right side, so if you are going to walk around with the camera you need to mount it on your right shoulder. You even need to use your right eye (for the most part) in the view finder.

When a video camera is mounted on a tripod, using your left hand becomes more important then the zooming in and zooming out with the right hand. Being left handed and using a one handled tripod is more useful then being right handed. A southpaw has more control on the panning (left to right, and up & down movement) with the tripod because the tripod has to be controlled by the left hand. Right handed people, who rarely use their left hand can have troubles guiding a video camera on a tripod because they don”t have the hand-eye control as much as us lefties who have to use our weaker hand more often.

Using a video camera on a tripod IS a left handed task. This is just one more thing that left handed people can do naturally better then right handed people.