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Congratulations to Arketta for winning the final of Swansea's Battle of the Bands last night. Some excellent bands an it took an awesome performance to secure victory

It is well known that Wales is primarily a rugby nation, but golf is becoming increasingly popular. A collection of anecdotes, jokes and humorous tales relating to the golfing world will be published this week. Golfing Jokes by Dilwyn Phillips, covers the subjects of Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden, Titters on the tee, Fourballs, Mixed Fours, Caddies, the 19th Hole and some general facts and fiction. Tiger Woods obviously gets a mention! Many of Waless rugby heroes play golf, and the sport is set to attract more interest with the Ryder Cup coming to the Celtic Manor Resort later on this year. Author Dilwyn Phillips has unearthed jokes covering all aspects of the game. He says, These DIY golf books usually cancel each other out. One book tells you to keep your eye on the ball, the next says not to bother. Personally, I have a much better idea: ditch the teach-yourself books and have a titter on the tee with this one. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did collecting the stories from my golfing pals. Dilwyn, who hails from Pontarddulais in south Wales, now lives in Los Montesinos, Spain and enjoys a round or two of golf and beer. He is the author of several best-selling joke books. Golfing Jokes (3.95) will be released by Y Lolfa on Monday the 5th of July and is available in book shops and on www.ylolfa.com .

Coinciding with the 70 th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, the novel To Win Against the Odds tells us of Thomas Joness extraordinary early life-story. Abandoned by his father at birth, he is bullied at school in the valleys of south Wales. His grandmother gives the seven-year-old boxing lessons to defend himself. At fourteen he works the coalface of Drum colliery and survives the flooding of the pit. Two years later, he has enrolled in the British Army and sees action in World War II before being wounded and evacuated from Dunkirk. On his return to south Wales he trains to become a teacher and is reconciled with valley life, starting yet another extraordinary chapter in his young life. The novel melds several common storylines that affected the lives of many men in the first half of the twentieth century. Thomas lived through desperate times but in the end he was one of the lucky ones Thomas T. Moynihan was born in 1947 and was raised in Ystalyfera in the upper Swansea Valley. He started work at 15 years of age at Ynyscedwyn Colliery before moving on to an engineering factory. He is married with two children, and is presently working with adults with special learning needs. This is his debut novel. To Win Against the Odds is published by Y Lolfa in June 2010.

Please bear with us while we beta test a a major new upgrade to the platform and to the site. We have already noted that status updates are temporarily down and notified Ning who are looking into the matter now. We hope that the transition will go as smoothly as possible and look forward to providing our members with a whole range of new services in the coming months. Meanwhile if you experience any technical issues please let us know. We will pass them on.

Already as a consequence of this upgrade we have been able to revamp our main navigation bar making a whole range of site features more easily accessible. Please let us know if there are any new features or improvements you would like to see on the site.

Diolch

Ceri/Gaabi

We are extremely pleased to announce that Welsh and Welsh-American authors at this year's Left Coast Eisteddfod have been invited to appear and speak at the Portland, Oregon Wordstock festival.

Welsh authors Niall Griffiths, Chris Keil and Peter Griffiths and Welsh-speaking American author Harrison Solow have been invited to present a panel discussion at Wordstock tentatively titled, "Welsh Identity in Literature Dylan Thomas to Dr. Who: " Wordstock is the Pacific Northwest's largest literary festival and features local authors and publishers, as well as authors from around the world. It is the Northwest's equivalent to the Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales and will be held this year at the Oregon Convention Center ( see picture below ) and other sites around the city. The festival attracts around 15,000 visitors annually.

This will be the second year at the Left Coast Eisteddfod for Niall Griffiths and Chris Keil. Niall Griffiths is the author of seven novels and a number of works of non-fiction, He is currently working on a new title in the Seren 'New Stories From the Mabinogion' series. Chris Keil is the author of The French Thing and Liminal and is a lecturer at Trinity, St. David's. Chris is currently working on his third novel due to be published later this year. Peter Griffiths' is the author of Tongue Tied , now in its fourth printing with Y Lolfa and very popular with Welsh-American audiences. Harrison Solow is a multiple award winning writer, university professor, former Writer in Residence at the University of Wales. She was awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize for Literature in 2008 for her non-fiction work, Bendithion, about Wales, Welshness and Timothy Evans. Her latest book, Felicity and Barbara Pym, published by Cinnamon Press, launches this month in Cardiff and London.

Left Coast Eisteddfod events are scheduled from Monday, October 4, 2010 through Saturday, October 9, 2010. Wordstock runs from Thursday, October 7, through Saturday, October 10. Watch the Left Coast Eisteddfod's site for more information.

It is with regret that we announce that our final ranking in the Chase Charity Community Giving contest was 205. Unfortunately we missed the top 200 by only 5 places. During validation we rose 4 places from position 209 where we finished last night and it appears that none of our votes were disqualified in the process. Effectively, another 70 or 80 votes would have won it for us.

We would like to thank everyone who supported us and voted for us. We would particularly like to thank the small group of volunteers who have worked on this unstintingly for the last four weeks and who have made real sacrifices in terms of their time and efforts. The contest was open to every registered charity in the US, with over 80,000 organizations receiving votes in the competition. If we were finally denied success it is largely because a great many organizations went into this better prepared than we were. Most had prior experience of last years contest and knew exactly how rough things would get in the last few days. We did not! We were aware that we would have to work harder as we drew closer to the finish line but underestimated the degree of competition that we would face. Consequently after struggling to stay in the top 200 for 27 days we were finally knocked out in the last 24 hours. This is a bitter pill to swallow but we did make rank 205 out of more than 80,000. We did everything we could to stay in the running and WE'LL BE BACK. Next time we will know exactly what we have to do to win.

This result will not affect our pre-existing plans for this years Left Coast Eisteddfod but unfortunately a program of expansion which was contingent upon our receiving this funding will not now go ahead. Although, of course, we are not giving up on finding other sources of funding. We will be making new and exciting announcements about the LCE in the days to come.

Once again...a thousand diolch's to all our supporters. CYMRU AM BYTH!

Read it here:- http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/faq#voting_counting

• VOTING HAS ENDED, WHY HAVEN'T THE WINNERS BEEN ANNOUNCED YET?

  Don't worry, the winners are coming! We appreciate your continued support and participation in Chase Community Giving. As a reminder, ourLeaderboard simply reflects the current standings of each charity andnot the final results, which will be announced around noon on July 13,2010.

  Unfortunately, during the program, we detected some isolated incidents of improper voting activity.

• Per our program rules, these votes will be disqualified and votes will be removed before the winnersare announced. To help us with these decisions, we've been working withFacebook and enlisted the expertise of an independent third party whoseresponsibility is to review Chase's process and criteria used toidentify fraudulent and other improper votes.

• Please note there are also instances where charities may be removed from the program because they do not meet the eligibility criteria orother requirements of the Image()).src ='/ajax/ct.php?app_id=162065369655&action_type=3&post_form_id=148b237e113055146eab870d034a610b&position=3&'+ Math.random();return true;">Official Rules . Thanks again for yourhelp and support of local charities across the country and check backaround noon on July 13th to see if any of your favorites are winners.

From our mates at WelshIcons. Please circulate:-

Help Prove Paul the Psychic Octopus Wrong

Our Welsh mates in theStates are at 195 out of 200 in a big competition which could win them $20,000 If they fall out of the top 200 then they get nothing. The contest finishes on Tuesday morning.

Paul has said (allegedly) that they will fail in their endeavours. Please help us prove this cocky cephalopod wrong.... READ MORE HERE

>Here are the latest ranking announcements ( see below ). There are only 36 hours to go and the race is becoming fiercely competitive. We need another 50 on the board by 3 pm (PST) 11 pm (UK time). It's doable Please keep contacting people directly and individually . It might also be an idea to encourage them to join Welsh and Celtic groups and post appeals to vote, together with our voting urls, on group walls?

Current ranking 182 with 1200 votes.....1220 on the board. Another great effort overnight but the pace has picked up and we need to redouble our efforts. We have stayed in this race for 27 days but everything hangs on what we do in the next 24 hours. Lets starts our sprint to the finish line now!! PLEASE VOTE NOW, POST APPEALS ON WELSH AND CELTIC GROUP WALLS, ASK A FRIEND,( BEG IF YOU HAVE TO ) ASK ALL YOUR FRIENDS, POST TO YOUR WALL OR USE YOUR GIFT VOTES!! WALES CAN DO IT! CYMRU AM BYTH!

EMERGENCY...we need to make 1300 votes very very rapidly PLEASE VOTE NOW, POST APPEALS ON WELSH AND CELTIC GROUP WALLS, ASK A FRIEND, ASK ALL YOUR FRIENDS, POST TO YOUR WALL OR USE YOUR GIFT VOTES!! WALES CAN DO IT! CYMRU AM BYTH!

Left Coast Eisteddfod Organizing Committee

My latest time-consuming occupation has been preparing a children's story with a picture to every page [25]. I shall never make that mistake again as it took forever.
I originally wrote the story in Welsh for our local eisteddfod. Trawsfynydd actually has two, one in Spring and one in Autum. It won me 12 which was a help to my wobbly budget. Later I wrote it in English with a few alterations and started on the pictures. A friend did some of them at first as I am good at dogs but not at drawing people. In the end I had to incorporate her people into new b+w pictures as I had done the dogs in ink and she did hers in graphite and the difference showed up on the computerised versions. However, in the process of endless resampling and drawing, scanning and redrawing I finally had 25 reasonably suitable pictures and started printing. I've been selling the booklet in the local market but need to add more so that it can finish as a book with a spine. I have in mind a sequel to the story but quail at the thought that any continuation in the same book would need as many illustrations.
Meantime I went back to the original Welsh version and rewrote it a bit to match the final English version and then got it checked by native speakers for mistakes. At the last minute U remembered the speech buttons were in English so had to revise several of those. Now it is ready for printing.and I have a new printer as the old one gave up the ghost. When I get a small stock of copies I'll post it here
http://www.merilang.com/about/books-by-daffni-percival/