Posted on General

25-25-25

August 2025 is set to be an exciting month for Support Life And Music! The organization is poised to launch its very first fundraiser: 25-25-25, aiming to raise $2500.00 to celebrate SLAM Summits episode 25 in 2025. As a bonus 25, the campaign will launch on Monday 8/4 and run through Friday 8/29/ 25 days.

All tax-deductible donations will go toward musician mental health research and continuing/improving the Artist Voices program, which includes SLAM Summits. With drawings and cool stuff for contributors! More details coming soon at the Support Life And Music website.

1,059 thoughts on “25-25-25”

  2. Crap joke for this morning:

    A blonde guy comes home early from work and hears weird noises coming from the bedroom.

    He races upstairs and finds his wife, completely naked, sweating and panting like she ran a marathon.
    “WHAT is going on?!” he shouts.

    She thinks quick and gasps, “I-I-I think I’m having a heart attack!”

    Panic sets in. He sprints downstairs to call 999, but just as he’s dialling, their 4-year-old son tugs his pant leg and says:

    “Daddy! Daddy! Uncle Ted’s hiding in your closet and he’s not wearing ANY pants!”

    The man drops the phone like it’s on fire and storms upstairs. He blasts past his “dying” wife, yanks the closet door open… and there’s his brother, Uncle Ted, buck naked, curled up on the floor.

    “YOU ROTTEN B*STARD!” the husband yells.
    “My wife’s in cardiac arrest and you’re running around the house butt-naked, scaring the kids?!”

  7. The Twilight Zone is arguably the greatest TV show of all time. Bar none. But there are plenty of painfully dreary episodes.

    So – – I’m selectively going back through the classics – – starting with the ones I’d either never seen, or haven’t seen since I was a kid. So far: Nick of Time, The Howling Man, The Masks, Walking Distance, Five Characters in Search of an Exit, A Game of Pool. Up next: The Living Doll.

    • I replied to a post in the previous stream when the site wasn’t working here, so I’ll say it here. Coincidentally, we rewatched Dragonslayer last week. It was still silly, but still fun

    • My Mam had fondness for the episode where a very young Robert Redford plays Death.

      I actually preferred The Outer Limits, it was more sci-fi and The Demon with a Glass Hand is just fantastic.

  8. I rewatched Transylvania 6-5000 last night. It had horrible reviews and if you just watch it for the plot, you will likely feel the same. But they really seemed to have just let Michael Richards and Carol Kane just do whatever the hell they wanted and the results were spectacular. Those actors have some of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a long time.

  13. Fantastic Four was my main comic as a tween reader (during the John Byrne era, for the nerds). I actually had a subscription for 1 year.

    The new FF movie gets that feeling perfect. There are so many great things about the movie. Galactus is awesome. Johnny Storm is finally likable. The 1960s aesthetic is just right. The nods to the classic comics are excellent.

    But.

    There are also a lot of half-developed/undeveloped characters, side-stories, and ideas. . . including goddamn Galactus. And goddamn Silver Surfer, who is used way too sparingly. It’s frustrating. All because a boardroom full of executives are seeing this as a franchise, and not one 2-hour movie that should be enjoyed by itself. If they’d set out to make the best movie possible, then this could have been among the best of all in the MCU.

    Still much more satisfying to me than Superman. I know everyone else loves that movie, so I’ll cut that thought off right there.

    • This has been my problem with the MCU for a while. When it was an Iron Man movie or a Thor movie and there were a reasonable number of characters to follow, I was all in. As the movie universe expanded and every movie had to reference 30 character, I just lost the ability to keep up. But… to be fair to the MCU, the problem isn’t limited to just them. Star Wars and DC has developed the same problem.

      • Any FF movies starts off with the challenge of making the whole team interesting, plus whoever your villains are. They tried harder with some characters than with others.

        All that said, I like and recommend this movie a lot. I just wish I loved it.

  15. Today is a good day.
    It’s my 29th wedding anniversary. The husband and I are going to try a local steak house for dinner tonight.

    Also, I just won a video game in a contest I entered. Gonna Play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in the near future.

  17. Not Loni!

    I saw (awhile ago) that she fought to make her WKRP character into someone capable and intelligent, not just the Miss Buxley eye-candy.

    Rest In Peace.

  18. If you ever feel stupid then you should know I downloaded all the episodes of the new season of King of the Hill to only discover that all the episodes are in Disney+

    Doh!

    • Just finished listening to an “Audible Original” that comes with no extra charge with my subscription. This was probably the best one I heard and it was still mediocre. Very science-bases storyline, but still has some Transformers Dark of the Moon level science errors that just pull me right out of the story. Like a character commenting (after having given a lengthy, and accurate, explanation of which stars are closest to the earth) flippantly says that a signal that came from 5 lightyears away might be from another galaxy. Science errors abound, even in places they really shouldn’t.

  30. My wife is on the board of a local museum.
    She was telling me that hidden in trump’s tax bill was a change to how Corporations can deduct charitable giving.
    According to what she has heard, this is going hurt charitable giving quite a lot but will be especially devistating to smaller charities.

    • Yes, this was of great concern to me, as someone struggling to launch my own nonprofit.

      I received an email from GiveButter not long ago saying that individual donors are going to be more critical than ever. :

  31. In better news… Today I am taking a road trip with a buddy of mine who I’ve known since the fourth grade. He jumped in his Escape Pod and retired from NASA last Friday.
    We’re going to take his EV and drive to Atlanta, see a baseball game and I don’t know what all. Just one of those things that seemed like it had to be done.
    I’ll have to let you guys know how “road tripping” in an electric car works out.

    • As it happens, T-Bird, myself, and the pooch took an EV road trip from Arizona to Kansas and back the first week of July. It basically consisted of two and half hours of driving, then 30 minutes of charging, rinse and repeat. Charging made the trip take 20% longer, but the frequent breaks were appreciated by all the bladders on the trip. I would comment that chargers are frequent enough to make road trips possible, but just enough. This means you have to plan for every stop ahead of time. Another interesting fact, half of all the chargers credit card readers malfunctioned. Luckily, 100% of the chargers had phone apps that you could use, and they worked. As an EV owner, you end up with about 5 different phone apps (Electrify America, ChargePoint, Ionna, Francis Energy, EVgo, Tesla, etc) to activate the chargers. I was worried that our small town destination would prove a challenge, as the nearest fast charger was 30 miles away, but it turned out they have two slow chargers. I could park the car overnight and have a full charge the next day.

      • So my experience was
        Similare to Rhett’s .
        We drove for two hours and decided we wanted lunch, so we stopped to grab a sub sandwich and since we were
        Already stopped – decided to hit a local fast charger while we ate. Before I could finish my lunch we were at 80% charge which gave the vehicle a 260 mile range.
        So we drove again until our bladders begged for a break and simply chose a stop with fast chargers. Again, we were up to 80% in like 15 minutes.
        Here is the kicker… we hit a stretch of “stop and go” traffic for like 40 minutes. The sort of thing that usually leaves me a tense mess… but the car kept us a set distance from the vehicle in front of us so he didn’t have to constantly ride the brake and gas peddle. The car just did that for him.
        An absolute game changer.
        It’s the fiuture and it’s here and it’s just so … normal!

  33. What I learnt today, this from the Wikipedia entry on the composer Alexander Courage:

    Courage went on to score incidental music for episodes “The Man Trap” and “The Naked Time” and some cues for “Mudd’s Women.” Courage reportedly became alienated from Roddenberry when Roddenberry claimed half of the theme music royalties. Roddenberry wrote words for Courage’s theme, not because he expected the lyrics to be sung on television, but so that he (Roddenberry) could receive half of the royalties from the song by claiming credit as the composition’s co-writer.[13] Courage was replaced by composer Fred Steiner who was then hired to write the musical scores for the remainder of the first season.

    • Yes, this is true. Canada is a strange sort of combination of metric and imperial. Our stoves are set at Fahrenheit. We use pounds and feet/inches to weigh ourselves and our height. Distance is in meters or kilometers. Speed is kilometers per hour. Food is in kilograms, fuel is purchased by the litre. Cloth is purchased by the meter, however wood (i.e. 2×4’s) is usually by the foot, but is slowly changing to meter.

  37. Before this week I had not watched a single episode of King of the Hill, but have really enjoyed the episodes of season 14 that I have viewed sir far.

    Go figure…

  47. The updated TZ watchlist:

    Nick of Time
    A Game of Pool
    Walking Distance
    The Shelter
    The Little People
    Five Characters in Search of an Exit
    The Howling Man
    The Masks
    The Living Doll
    The Grave
    The Silence
    A Nice Place to Visit
    The Four of Us Are Dying

    All of the above have ranged from good to great.

    Up next: The Hitch-Hiker.

  50. Your crap joke for a Sunday evening:

    My coworkers laugh at my jokes in in-person meetings, but never in online meetings.
    When I asked them why, they said that my jokes weren’t remotely funny.

  51. Decided to share Eye of the Beholder with the little one. She was a bit freaked leading up to the big reveal… I offered to pause, but we soldiered on through to the end.

  53. Crap joke for the day:

    A guy walks into a bar with his dog, plops him on a barstool, and orders a bourbon & Coke.

    Then he turns to the dog and says, “What’ll you have, Rover?”
    Rover looks at the bartender and says, “Scotch and soda — light on the soda.”

    The bartender stares. “No way. That dog can’t talk — you’re a ventriloquist.”
    “Nope, he’s the real deal,” the man says. “I’m going to the restroom — talk to him yourself. But don’t let him out of your sight. He’s worth a fortune.”

    When the man comes back… no dog.
    “Where’s Rover?!”
    “I didn’t believe he could talk, so I gave him a couple of bucks to get me a newspaper and some chewing tobacco at the drugstore.”

    No sign of him at the drugstore, so they search all over town until eventually they find him in an alley… having a whale of a time on top of a French poodle.

    The man shouts, “Rover! What on earth are you doing?! You’ve never done this before!”
    Rover pants and says… “First time I ever had any money!”

  54. An article came up in my feed with the op-ed headline from the AZ Republic: “ICE Detains Parents Walking Child to School. This is not OK.”

    With over 1100 laugh emojis.

    I blocked about 50 as a feel-better exercise. I’m venting this here, then moving on with my day.

  55. In happier news, I had a really powerful meeting over the weekend. My flabber is gasted at the careers of the people in the room – – asking me about my career and about SLAM!

  57. Fourth time seeing Ghost on the big stage, and first time with the eldest daughter.

    Man, do they put on an evening.

    Interestingly, we had to put our phones into Yondr pouches, which we kept on our persons, but which made the phones inaccessible. No filming, no texting, no photos, just fans and performers, like the 1980s.

    For me, I post photos to media, so I missed having that option. But I do *detest* the people who hold their phones overhead to film entire songs. So it had its pros and cons.

    • I take a few photos when I go to gigs, yes to post to Facebook but also to look back on in my camera roll and have my memory prodded.

  67. JW: Sole Survivor

    A twilight zone ish made for tv movie with a young William Shatner and Richard Basehart.

    Originally released in 1970, I haven’t seen it since the 1970s.

    Still good.

  68. Crap home for the day:

    Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence; then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?

  80. I feel kind of nauseous and elderly after reading this, but I identify with the Limp Bizkit entry. My hatred for that band is blistering – – but they somehow accidentally created one pretty good song on their own.*

    https://defector.com/the-worst-songs-we-love-so-much

    *Their cover of Faith is amusing. Was. That should have been it.
    *Method Man makes an excellent guest appearance in one song, which almost salvages it.

    • Zod is one of the greatest villains of our childhood, so I’m ok remembering him this way, but you are right. He was great in just about every role. My 2nd fave of his would have been The Limey, which did “old guy kicks ass” about 10 years before Liam Neeson and everyone else got in on it.

  84. Just landed in Vancouver.
    Airports involved in a strike are very quite and kind of creepy.
    Waiting to catch a hop to Victoria.

    Have spotted my first “Tim Hortons”.

  86. So like 2-3 days ago, I discovered this movie called “Stay Human,” which I found to be pretty moving. It’s made by musician Michael Franti, and it follows him connecting with some people doing noble humanitarian acts on big and small scales. I was planning on reaching out to his PR people.

    In the last 24 hours, he’s been bombarded with a slew of SA accusations. One young woman made a post, and a bunch of others have jumped on.

    Now. . . none of this is proof of anything. . . but every accusation needs to be taken seriously. Every accuser needs to be heard and given full benefit of the doubt. No matter what, it’s disappointing.

  89. Since he’s been home, I’ve discovered the husband doesn’t like to do anything spur of the moment. I’m getting a new computer. We were literally a block from the store on Friday but he wouldn’t go because he put it in our calendar we are going tomorrow
    *sigh*

  90. Victoria is now pretty high on my list of places to seek refuge if things in the US continue on their current path to authoritarianism.
    Lots to like here and the climate is rather mild.

  94. Crap joke for the day:

    Sean had long heard the story of a family tradition. Apparently, his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been able to walk on water on their 18th birthday.
    On that special day, they would walk across the lake to their local pub, Murphy’s Bar, for their first legal drink.
    So when Sean’s 18th birthday came around, he and his friend Mick took a boat, rowed out to the middle of the lake, and Sean stepped out confidently.
    He immediately sank like a stone and nearly drowned.
    Mick managed to pull him back into the boat just in time.
    Confused and furious, Sean went to see his grandmother.
    “Gran, ’tis my 18th birthday! Why couldn’t I walk on water like me father, me grandfather, and his father before him?”
    Grandma looked at Sean with kind, knowing eyes and said,
    “Because they were all born in January, when the lake was frozen over…
    You were born in August, ye feckin’ eejit!”

  95. The writing and acting on the Peacock series “Twisted Metal” is better than it should be for this type of show. 1st season was a blast. 2nd season so far isn’t quite as good, but still entertaining.

  100. I have a friend who wrote a duology. Being a good friend, I offered to format them for him. He sent me both books as a single file, which I had to separate into two separate books. He also sent a separate file with a glossary, his bio, and dedication. He also included a table of contents for each book in the second file (which I didn’t use as it’s generated automatically).
    Since this is not the first book I’ve formatted for him, I asked why he decided to give it to me in such a strange manner, he merely shrugged.
    My life is an adventure.

  109. Crap Joke from me for once:
    A wife sends her husband a text: If you are sleeping, send me your dreams. If you are laughing, send me your smile. If you are eating, send me a bite. If you are drinking, send me your tears. I love you!
    The husband responds: I am on the toilet. Please advise.

  113. So watched the first season 2 of Peacemaker, maybe it’s just my tastes but the choice of music for the title sequence is not as catchy as S1.

  114. I woke up and my glasses had somehow gotten lost in the sheets, instead of their usual spot on my nightstand.

    Unrelated: I think “Time Enough At Last,” the famous Burgess Meredith episode, will be next on my Twilight Zone rewatch.

  116. The one good thing about the husband being retired, I have not used the vacuum once since he’s been home. He says he enjoys doing it. Who am I to deny him pleasure?

    • Centra Florida is currently being invaded and overrun by WaWa gas stations. I would be happier if it was being invaded and overrun by Tim Hortons.

      I a meeting for community advocates for a local paper, someone was talking about a new WaWa going in near her and someone else replied, “I’d ask where, but any corner I pick is probably be right”

      • As a coffee shop it’s fine but otherwise I always found Tim Horton’s to be overrated and the food to be rather meh.
        Controversial for a Canadian I know

          • There is a drive through branch about 25 minutes walk away, been open a few years and still haven’t visited it.

          • I’ve always heard Timmy’s compared, favorably and unfavorably, to Dunkin’ Donuts. We actually had Tim Hortons stands inside the hockey arena for a few seasons of Coyotes games. Their coffee and donut holes were definitely very similar to Dunkins.

          • Wawa is deeply beloved back in NJ, but only since about 2000.

            Wawa as I remember it is like an upgraded 7-11 or AM/PM.

        • WaWa got it’s start in PA and I first heard about them from a friend that grew up there. It has a similar standing in PA to Tim Horton’s in Canada. And I find their food as overrated as TEB finds Tim Horton’s. My experience with Tim Horton’s donuts is that I find them to taste pretty much the same as Dunkin. I don’t see much of a difference. For a truly wonderful donut experience, I’ve found some local places that make their stuff in smaller batches than the industrial donuts at large chains.

    • I like the guy standing by with the fire extinguisher.

      Also… where does the line stand these days between an “RC” and a “drone”?

  122. K-Pop Demon Hunters is officially a phenomenon. I went with the 3 girls to a movie theater sing-along showing of the movie yesterday. It had been sold out, so they split the viewings into two screens.

  124. Crap joke for a very early Monday morning:

    I had a blind date last night, and I was a little worried about what to do if he wasn’t my type at all. My friend told me about this genius app called “Dad, Are You Okay?” — it schedules your phone to ring right after you meet your date.

    ✅ If you like them, ignore the call.
    ❌ If you don’t, answer: “Dad? What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

    Perfect plan… or so I thought.

    He shows up, and he’s absolutely gorgeous – no worries at all, I’m a lucky woman. But just as I’m about to walk with him to his car, his phone rings. he picks up and says… “Dad? What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

    • While their fascism wasn’t democratically installed, I would put Taiwan in a category that successfully transitioned to democracy without a war.

  132. Tonight watched the new Red Sonja.

    It was silly and the villain was pathetic. The actor who played Klaus in Umbrella Academy deserved better writing.

    Matilda Lutz looked better than she acted.

  133. Bruce Dickinson tonight! Sadly, did not connect with Bruce or any of the band.

    He not only sang beautifully (at 67 years of age), but he also played theremin, taiko drums, and percussion on a bunch of the songs, including Frankenstein.

    “Flash of the Blade” brought the house down, though.

  134. Nothing reminds how how dumb you are then listening to a scientist explain how they solved how to keep collecting data from the Kepler telescope when two of it’s gyroscopes failed.

    • I was part of 2 sci-fi/fantasy/horror/etc. (just call it geek) radio shows as an undergrad in the late 80s – early 90s. We would pre-record our show and we did a lot of short story readings that needed instrumental background music. Tangerine Dream was a definite go-to for that music.

  150. I’m getting a little tired (ok… a lot tired) of the William Castle type gimmicks that modern horror movies are pulling. Are we really this stupid that this kind of garbage still works?
    https://geektyrant.com/news/lionsgate-cranks-up-the-tension-in-new-the-long-walk-featurette-tracking-real-audience-heart-rates
    https://geektyrant.com/news/too-gory-to-handle-the-toxic-avenger-triggers-walkouts-as-its-not-for-the-faint-of-heart
    https://geektyrant.com/news/terrifer-2-is-really-making-people-faint-and-vomit-during-theatrical-screening
    https://geektyrant.com/news/talk-to-me-filmmakers-says-horror-film-had-audiences-members-fainting-and-the-creator-of-the-cursed-hand-quit

    https://collider.com/william-castle-horror-showman

  152. We watched ep1 of Alien Earth. I really liked the way they recreated the look and feel of the original Alien movie. I’m in for more.

    Four mildly-spoilery things bug me (no pun intended).

    I’m a little fuzzy on the android’s role in the first movie. I’d thought that no one had ever seen the xenomorphs before the Nostromo encountered that one. If this show is a prequel, is it altering the concept of original movies?

    How tf is there no failsafe in place to prevent a giant ship from crashing like that?

    I guess we’re leaning into the “xenomorphs were actually a result of human genetic engineering” thing from the recent shitty movies, rather than retconning back to the “unknowable alien menace?” Disappointing.

    Are we going to get a whole bunch of nasties in this series? Aren’t the xenos enough?

    • As far as the prequel thing goes, the producer says this is not cannon so there’s that. Think of it as more alternate universe.

      The husband also likes to think of it as a “different Earth”, not the original. As in, a different planet named after Earth, not the original Earth, so not everybody knows what happened there as it’s an outer planet.

      Me personally, I just go with it and don’t put too much thought into it.

  153. Well, if you want dumb, watch “Twisters”. We finally watched that tonight. I can pretty confidently say the only thing they got right was that it was filmed in and around Oklahoma City. It was soooo dumb. But TCat and I were very entertained by pausing the movie and pointing out how bad it was to each other. So, at least for us, it was entertaining but bad and not in a good way. And, I guess the new Superman has a small role in it too. 😀

  155. So the plan for tonight is to watch the 1954 version of 1984.

    The one with Peter Cushing, the one I’ve heard and read about since I was a child, tonight is the night to finally watch it.

    Adapted by Nigel Kneale who also wrote Quatermass,

  157. We caught The Thunderbolts now that it’s out on Disney+. Overall, we enjoyed it though I don’t think it was worth the expense of a theater ticket. We had watched most of the Disney+ shows that introduced these characters, so were familiar with them.

    I think it would have been a hard sell for folks who aren’t already subscribers and keeping up with everything that Marvel has been putting out.

    • Thunderbolts was good, but kinda mid. It felt like an X-Men flick.

      I definitely agree: this one relies heavily on the viewer to have watched the other Marvel shows and movies.

    • I wasn’t keeping up on the Disney+ shows that introduced the other characters, but I did see the Black Widow movie. That was about all I needed to understand what was going on. I was definitely less invested in the other characters, but it was worth the ride for Yelena and Alexi.

  158. There’s a lot of cheesy movie viewing going on around here!

    I did my part with MST3K Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster from the Internet Archive.

  165. So finally watch the remastered released of Ninteen Eighty Four from 1954.

    Because it was effectively a live version with film inserts the quality is pretty poor with everything looking soft but still watchable.

    Nicely acted, but then Peter Cushing, even near the start of his career does not disappoint.

  166. Still in Canada.
    Should hit Vancouver tonight. It will be the 2nd and last time.
    Having a lovely time but I need to go home and get some rest.
    Been reading the requirements for Canadian citizenship.
    I might should erase that from my phone before trying to pass back though customs.

  168. And happy Labor Day, Mericans!

    I had 2 big meetings. And I’ve set today a pretty big deadline to publish something, so I’m banging away at that. And we spent many hours swapping out our old worn-out couch for a new one from one of Tiff’s coworkers.

    So a bunch of labors today.

  169. From the New Yorker. The full article is behind a paywall, but this snippet is still powerful:

    If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase. Will it submerge human originality in a sea of unmotivated, formulaic art, or allow for the expression of new visions?
    “Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?,” the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier noted. “But it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” One day, Lanier speculated, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single “A.I. hub.” There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences. “You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it’s shared with a bunch of other people.”
    “Compared with the specificity of real art made by actual individuals with authentic lives, I thought, culture generated ad infinitum, in a formless flow, devoid of context or personality, would be meaningless,” Rothman writes. But “perhaps we’ll be able to make meaning for ourselves out of automated art.”