I started listening back in '03 after Evan Dorkin mentioned Tom's Howard Dean/Cronos mash-up on his blog. When I first heard the show, I wondered why the host would tolerate a guest openly threatening his life, but then I went to friendsoftom.com and all was revealed. I listened off and on for the next few years, but when I went to college in '05, that's when I became a dedicated FOT, listening every week, scouring the internets for classic S & W bits (I couldn't stand the old RealPlayer archives), donating during the marathons, etc.
I'm a huge fan of podcasts now, but it was Tom who trained my ear to "visualize" pure audio. What I mean by that is I, like most everyone in the US born after 1970, never really developed an appreciation for the "theater of the mind" school of broadcasting, growing up as I did awash in mainly visual media - television, comic books, the internet etc. - so, aside from a few rare exceptions like the Stan Freberg box set I got one Xmas, I never grasped the amazing possibilities of what can be done with a wholly aural medium.
But Tom & Jon's bits have, over the course of ten years, woven an entire fictional town in my mind from the ground up. And more than a few S & W routines have precisely the thing Freberg bemoaned was disappearing from radio in the late 60s' - images, created with the raw spoken word, that would take significantly more money to do in a visual medium (i.e. The GG Allin Skyscraper, Hippy Johnny's Mellow Grove Commune, The Toolbelt Killer, etc.). And because I've received this training from listening to the Best Show, it makes podcasting (the theater of the unfiltered mind) that much more enjoyable to me, especially shows that try to create their own "theater of the mind" atmosphere, like Comedy Death-Ray Radio and SuperEgo.
So thank you, Tom. Podcasting is medium with nigh-limitless potential, and you helped me realize the potential it had before the medium even existed. I'll keep listening as long as you keep broadcasting (and the fill-in hosts too).
