Here's the Tower

Did you know that babies don’t really enjoy beer festivals, concerts and loud restaurants with spicy food? Maybe your precious angel is trying to tell you something and everyone is getting the message except you.

I’m so delighted whenever I get to hear feedback from you, my dedicated listening audience, so I thought I’d open up the phone lines and take your calls.

Guest voice: Pat McClimans as the caller

Talking wrong is one of my favorite ways to entertain myself. I have picked up many phrases over the years that I like to use in my everyday conversations.

Foremost and first, phrases like “right arm” and “of corpse” are easy to quickly slip into a conversation so the person you’re speaking with doesn’t notice you’ve said anything different than what they expected to hear.

I picked up some of these phrases from other people, and while I can’t remember where they all came from, I would like to thank Kassie McDonald for “suture yourself” which is one of my favorites. Thanks also to anyone else who has contributed to my vocabulary.

Some of the terms included in this episode are common phrases – such as “rest and relaxation” or “sticks and stones” – which sound annoyingly awkward when the pairs of words rearranged.

And not least but last, I’d like to recommend the 1994 essay “How I Met My Wife” by Jack Winter, which is littered with uncomfortably uncommon word forms like chalant, cognito and flappable. I don’t know anything about the author, but this essay is really grapes.

Tower loyalists are on hand to see the introduction and first demonstration of a new smart speaker and its cutting-edge conversational interface. All you have to do is say ‘Hey Tower’ and the device magically responds to your voice commands. So, like, hello world.

A dark cloud hangs over the season premiere as fans are stunned by the death of a beloved character from the Here’s the Tower Universe.

Legendary sportscaster Marty Klein was best known as the voice of Baseball Simulator and rose to become the number one announcer of portable devices for artificial sports broadcasts.

Our staff of writers – apparently disgruntled because their vacation is over – has taken to killing off popular characters in retribution. How long can this madness continue?

A well-deserved vacation is in order for Here’s the Tower‘s staff of 26 writers, five field producers, 38 actors, six cellists, four mechanics, one backend developer, two innovation engagement managers, one scrum master, an influencer… I mean con artist… one director of stakeholder alignment, a CRM specialist, two bartenders, a team of WiFi password guessers, and one vegetarian horse meat chef.



Thank you to all of them for their hard work over the past year, as well as to Dracula, Michael Peterson, album designer Henry Streck, Southern lawyer Frank Davidson, and his cousin, psychic Frances Davidson (but she knew I was going to say that).



I’ll be on the road this summer, playing shows in Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Italy and maybe even God’s Great United States. My new six-song record, The Kentuckian, hits your favorite music services on May 29th, but you can get it today at www.metroschifter.com.



Your favorite weekly one-minute audio adventure series will be back in September with all new episodes.

If you’re too busy or lazy to look at your smartphone, just pick up the old landline and one of our helpful assistants will walk you through all the latest posts in your social media feeds.

Rachel Matchett returns to the program as the voice of your social media operator.

Another musical experiment is afoot as a lot of music gets packed into an unusual set of 28 measures.

Longtime listener Randy is on the line with some straight talk about the recent arrest of Julian Assange. The host of Views on the News fully agrees, “His goose is cooked.”