The Right Track Programme

This morning I read a story in The Aucklander about The Right Track programme which is an intense program for first time motoring offenders to get them to think twice in the future about boy racing, drinking and driving and other motoring activities that are dangerous to themselves and innocent bystanders.

According to the police this programme is having good results, but it seems that funding from Manukau City Council is going to end. They said that it was never a long term exercise.

Amongst other things members of the programme visit the Otara Spinal Unit and meet survivors who now need a wheelchair for their mobility. Funeral Directors talk to them about how they have to pick up body parts after an accident and try to put them together for funeral viewing.

It’s all about having the ambulance at the top of the cliff according to John Finch who developed the programme which is a world first.

My father in law has had throat cancer and as a consequence had a laryngectomy. In conjunction with the NZ Cancer Society he visited many primary schools and told his story. He let the children have a look at the whole in his throat and see how he can talk. He let them ask questions and gave them honest answers. It’s interesting how onto it kids are. He has dozens of letters from students saying that they will never ever smoke. I would say he has probably saved at least one or two lives, which probably represents a six figure sum at least to our health system.

An ambulance at the top of the cliff has to be significantly greater than the cost of mopping people of the road after a needless accident, but unless funding is found, this excellent and selfless service will disappear.

I wrote a song about situations that kids find themselves. It’s called One More Time Around the Block and you can hear it at Music Forte.

It thundered down the road like a young boy racers dream

The Rockford Fosgate sub beat like a life support machine

They never saw what hit them on the wrong side of the bend

They didn’t have an inkling that their lives were going to end.

The mourners stood in silence dressed in dark clothes, mostly black

A mother screamed her lungs out, cried “I want my baby back”

Their friends stood round in circles, still not coping from the shock

They said they be five minutes, one more time around the block.

They were best of friends like they were tied at the seam

They knew what each was thinking and they shared the same big dreams

They were just young men in the prime of their life

Their futures lay before them, empty pages still to write.

But now those days are over and their lives have been snuffed out

The sub’s no longer thumping and their hearts have lost their clout

If only they had listened, if only they had stopped

They said they’d be five minutes one more time arouind the clock.

And now the music’s playing and the mourners begin to pray

They sing the Lord’s Prayer and ask themselves

Why did it end this way?

The V8’s sound like thunder, can’t you hear the engine’s roar?

Car horns sound a last salute with feat flat to the floor

Wish we could have changed the outcome, wish we could have stopped the clock

They said they’d be five minutes, one more time around the clock

They said the’d be five minutes, one more time around the clock.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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Songs from Dad to Daughter

Lots of people have been reading my blog about my new song Watch Me daddy. Obviously lots of fathers are looking for something special for their precious girl, especially when she gets married.

Here’s my song. Why not drop me a line and see if I can come up with a version that fits your precious daughter. I can put together a slideshow with your photos and rewrite some of the lyrics so that they tell your story together.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Watch Me Daddy – My latest song

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you will know that I upload Songwriting Tips on my tweets and am now over 250.

So one of the tips, which seems obvious. but isn’t always, is Write About What You Know.

Another one is to pick a song from the repertoire of someone who’s music you like, or who is very successful and try to emulate it. So I combined those 2 concepts and came up with Watch Me Daddy which you can hear on my MusicForte page as of this morning.

First I looked at the Billboard Country Music Top Country Chart about a month ago and number one was Trace Adkins with You’re Gonna Miss This, which was a great song.

I then looked at the structure, the topic and added what I know.

Watch Me Daddy is about my daughter and your daughter and every girl’s father. Throughout their childhood they want to share what they are learning and what they can do and in the lead break you can hear my daughter aged around 3 saying Watch this Dad.

The situation doesn’t really change and they always want you to be proud of them and watch what they get up to, which is part of that special relationship that girls have with their Dad’s.

Earlier this year I had the privlege to not only walk my daughter down the aisle, but she sang beautifully to the accompaniment of my guitar as we walked down the aisle together. It was a Shania Twain song, not one of mine, but it was an awesome experience. It was all that either of us could do to not cry and I avoided eye cntact with the assembled family and friends so as not to lose the plot. There wasn’t a dry eye in the assembledge.

So what I did was to write a song that was both for her and for all fathers and daughters. Another tip from my tweets is write in such a way as to have people think I wrote it for them. That everyone can relate to. I think in this song I have achieve that for a great many people. Now all I need to do is to get a professional singer to add it to his repertoire and I can move on to the next song which is hitting paper.

If you’d like to hear this song, you can find it at MusicForte along with other songs. Please have a listen and if you like it, tell someone, especially if you know an artist that can do it justice, or an A&R person:)

I gave away my little girl today

You’re going to change your name

With tears of pride I walked you down the aisle and you said

Watch Me Daddy one more time, and I love you

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Wash Your Hands After You Do Your Business! Coronavirus update.

I originally wrote this in 2008, but now with over 20,000 confirmed cases of Coronavirus, and 426 deaths, it suddenly becomes even more important. While people are clambering for facemasks it has now been confirmed that with the right temperatures the Coronavirus has been observed to stay alive on a smooth surface for five days!

I was horrified in my last place of work to see how many people don’t wash their hands after doing their business. I shared the post below with them as a more subtle way of getting the message across without embarrassing anyone, but better embarrassed than risking Coronavirus don’t you think?

Here’s what I wrote 12 years ago. Nothing much has changed in the way people behave, which is pretty sad:

This is really a story about men’s hygiene in the bathroom, but it probably applies to some women as well. I was listening to the Ante Up Podcast as I showered this morning and they were talking about men who leave the washroom without washing their hands after doing their business.

Ante Up is a great podcast about Poker and has lots of great information for amateurs like myself and even those who think they know it all. What’s more, they very kindly played the new song I wrote, called I Tilted on their show.

Anyway, they covered an issue that really annoys me, which is guys who go to the toilet and then return to the poker table without having washed their hands. The thing is that of the guys that have been in and out of the bathroom at the same time as me in poker tournaments, as many as 50% do their business and return to the tables without using soap or water. Then they handle the cards, hand me their chips when I win them off them and share their germs with everyone on the table. How bad is that? Lots of people eat their fries or other food at the poker table while they are playing, they might lick a finger or thumb as they are dealing their cards and, well it doesn’t really bear thinking about. In this day and age, you would think that grown men would have more self-respect and concern for their health. I know that some women are the same, but I suspect the ratio would be far less.

I had a look at a website called 1st-in-handwashing.com and found:

The importance of handwashing can be assessed by looking at a list of germs found on human hands.  Here are a few:

• Shigella flexneri…causes vomiting, headache, diarrhea
• Streptococcus pyrogens…causes tonsilitis, sore throats, scarlet fever,impetigo
• Salmonella … causes severe diarrhea, stomach pain, dizzyness, fever
• Rhino virus…over 200 strains causing great misery in the form of colds
• Proteus vulgaris…urinary tract infextions
• Hepatitis A…vomiting, liver disorders, jaundice
• Escherichia coli 0157 …kidney failure, uncontrollable fever, death
• Rotavirus …55,000 children hopitalized with this each year
• Echovirus…meningitis, encephalitis, neonatal sepsis, myocarditis, and chronic infection
• Coxsackie virus…sore throat, abdominal discomfort, or nausea

Now that’s just for starters.

Some years ago a popular hotel in New Zealand conducted tests on the peppermint jar at the restaurant counter, where people paid their bills after their meals. They tested mints that were not individually sealed but were there for people to help themselves to. Amongst other things, they found fecal coliforms, urine residue and even semen residue! These are new peppermints that people hadn’t yet enjoyed.

Now etiquette says that you don’t confront people, you don’t tell grown adults to wash their hands, and if I did I might find myself getting smacked for my trouble. But we’re supposed to be civilised, aren’t we? So what can you do?  What everyone else does, when someone loses and leaves the table, you give them a firm handshake to make sure you don’t miss out on any of the germs that didn’t make it to the playing cards or the poker chips!

Does this make your stomach churn? Maybe if this is discussed in places like this blog, more people will be conscious of it and decide that even if they don’t care about giving their germs to other people, they might at least aim to wash the other people’s germs of their own hands.

You may think this is funny, but the number of germs that get shared and cause serious illness, that could be avoided by a little attention to hygiene.

Think about it. How many hands did you shake today? Have you touched any money lately? Have a sniff of that $5 note in your pocket and think about where that’s been and why does it smell? Now go and buy your lunch and watch the person handle your food with their gloves and then without taking them off, handle your money and change.

Scary isn’t it. Well, that’s my soapbox for today. Hope I made you think a little. See you at the poker table. My hands will be clean, at least when I first sit down.

Thanks for reading my soapbox, pardon the pun:)

I Tilted was featured on Learning Poker From The Joes

This week I got some great news. Not only did the great podcast Learn Poker from the Joes out of Florida play my new song, they created a whole show around it. If you play Texas Holdem Tournaments, their podcast is well worth a listen as it has lots of great information to help you improve your game and end up on the last table.

This one is no exception as Tilting as we call it in poker is a great way to go from hero to zero. So if you want to hear my song again in a different context and learn some gerat information from the Joes, head to http://www.learnpokerfromthejoes.com/PokerJoes/Home.html and listen to the show.

I wrote the song after making a bad judgement at my local Texas Holdem tournament a couple of months ago. I was 2 places from reaching the final table but didn’t have a big stack. I was small blind and had enough to get me to the last table if I folded. The guy next to me said “I’ll put you in blind.” I didn’t want to and wasn’t going to take the bet, but then otehr people including the host prodded me saying what a good bet it was. I ended up caving in, playing my Ace, 5 suited and finshed the game in 9th place. At the same time another person lost. If I hadn’t tilted, the worst I would have done would have been to come 9th which meant qualifying points towards the regional champs. I went home early.

The following weekend I wrote the song called I Tilted which has now been featured on 2 poker shows.

If you don’t want to listen to the podcast you can also hear the song on my Myspace page at www. myspace.com/luigicappel