Letter Of Moderation-Two Months…now whadawagonnado?
Dan Beckmann, Moderator of Letters
04.07.02-Washington, DC
They tried their best…yes, those dastardly and cowardly “Midwestern State Univesities” tried their best to take away what Idealism I had and while they did do some serious damage, but I put up a darn good fight. Under the current policies at my present “Midwestern States University” I am required to have a 3.0 in order to maintain my position in this graduate program. As I am now half way through the program, although it has been close, I currently hold just that a 3.0 GPA-so yes they did a great deal of damage, but I tried my hardest to maintain as much as I could without being shut out of the system.. you know accoridng to the legend this piece of paper will provide my future self with more interesting and fulfilling work at a higher pay scale so that I may afforded the luxury of doing less of it.
I marched right into that graduate program in September with a great deal of idealism for the world, if not for my professional field, as well-I was one of those happy go lucky types. I believed that you should be nice and cheezy to just about anybody and if they threw lemons your way I simply eat them or take them home with me and share them with o thers.. But as that Chicago winter started to come on and the horse trainers from the “Midwestern States University” who were programmed during the now ill-fated 1980s period of Action Broadcast News attempted to take ownership of my very ass, the only way for which to maintain a shred of my own idealism was through a little bit of Yoga and a lot of tomarken.com.
Now as I have finally been permitted to leave the grasps of Chicago and travel on for my “capstone experience” in my graduate studies in Washington DC, I am proud to say that while I feel somewhat damaged and although the healing pro-cess may take time, despite what the committee may think, nothing that they have tried to do is not as irreversible and as withstanding of time’s maturations as Umbros®.
Moving towards a more legitimate and logical assessment of the ‘events at tomarken’ over the last 2 months… It’s been about two months since ‘Tomarken.com” smacked the internet and let me just tell you that it has been an overwhelming success-no really. There were many think-tanks, pundits, labor organizers, and the like that were consulted on this effort whom generally claimed that this concept of ‘mutually beneficial’ ‘non heinous self-promotion’ was about as dead as the people who enjoyed the Lawrence Welk Show for so many years. Yet, these yaking, self-important know-it-alls didn’t stop the likes of Larry King from attempting to resurrect the late, great Lawrence Welk from the grave and they sure as hell didn’t deter us in our efforts. (But then again if we could figure out how to get dead people to count for our ‘ratings system’ the same way that Larry King does, we’d be rich enough to start selling this thing out right now, but this among many other things about Larry King that defy the laws of physics shouldn’t be analyzed too much as for fear for what Larry can and will do to those who dare ask questions of him …silence___)
The truth is that Tomarken is taking over the world faster than the over-all hatred of the American people and their renegade ‘leader’ with his gracious slogans. I SPEAKY NOWY TO THOSE WHO COME TO TOMARKEN FROM FAR AWAY LAND! WELCOMEN A TOMARKEN.COM! WE MEAN YOU NO HARM! WE WOULD NOT ONLY LOVE TO HAVE YOUR MONEY, BUT ALSO YOUR SUPPORT AND PHOTO-OPPURUNTIES FOR OUR ‘NON HIENIOUS COLLECTIVE SELF-PROMOTIONAL EFFORTS’ DANK YOU VERY MUCH SIR!
Yes, the Internet allows us very scientific and specifically calculated statistics on who is coming to our site and from where they are hitting it up from. We were very much surprised to see that we have received hits from 5 out of the 7 continents, but of course our guys in the assimilation deparment over on 31st Terr. Are hard at work on figuring out Africa and Antartica. From Australia to Austria, Belgium to the unspecified foreign locations with 1 or two hits a piece; people or things are coming to tomarken to satisfy all of the itches that only the gold-bonded® and now heavily medicated powder that tomarken can provide.
We would especially like to welcome our Japanese visitors who are according to the esteemed intervalist tomarken.com Dr. Yarrum , are coming to tomarken in search of sexual stimulation. Apparently the theory is that tomarken may have many meanings in tongues of foreigners. We welcome these efforts from our fish eating friends and those who do not eat fish who are not our friends over in Japan-we can only hope, on our honor, that we are serving your needs well.
Overall, in the two months that we have been up we have received approximately 20,000 visits from varying sources. Oh, and I actually shit you not-we were as surprised as you probably are right now and to be “frank” if you will, we have no fucking clue how all of this could have happened. Our adwizards have bee crunching the numbers all night and even though we promised them job security, since they have yet to figure anything out, I wouldn’t invest if that new fishing pole if I were them,,,if ya know what I mean. To be honest, we have been struggling somewhat in our marketing efforts due to the shadiness of the bumpersticker industry. The thought over here at the tomarken world center is, that if we can finally get these bumpster stickers off the ground, our models predict that by the end of the summer that this tomarken, whom ever he/she or it may be will have enough popularity worldwide to encite the overthrow of governments everywhere in order to make way for the world wide socialist federation of Tomarkenland under which humans can finally enter space once again in order to “stink up the rest of the galaxy.” I wonder what those self-important, naysaying idiots from the think tanks, and organized labor organizations think about that one?
With all of this incredible success in mind, I do believe that after two months we can start to take ourselves pretty damn seriously and start going grossly into debt by holding business write-off style luncheons and keynote speakerships at Holiday and Ramada Inns with little bottles of Heintz Ketchup® and many yellow pitchers of water all across the New Jerseyland Area. But before we do that, I would like to address some evolutionary measures that will coincide with these ridiculous and excessive overindulgence.
#1)Tomarken’s New Weekly Rotation Even though the site will be updated at several points throughout every single week, hour, and day throughout the foreseeable future, I thought it be prudent to channel a majority of our creative efforts towards the Sunday/Monday corridor. The reason for this suggested are many… and while we still encourage everyone to submit haphazardly as they have been this Sunday/Monday focus will allow for those submitting and those reading to have a good guidepost on when the best time is to check all of that is tomarken out. This will also maybe be a good point in the rotation for the moderators to do a bit of weekly house keeping to the front page, but lets try not to get to far ahead of ourselves here.
#2) Paternal Guidance and Wisdom Many of you may have started to write something, others of you may have even been afraid to start that process, because you think you’re stupid or your suck or that nobody wants to hear what you might have to say. WELL…we will be the judge of that thank you very much! If you can’t even get it to us, then how are WE supposed to even reject it for you? This is all hogwash about your stuff isn’t good enough or you’re a moany and crotchedly moroon. Save that for the now defunct Sally Jesse Raphael Show. We here at tomarken would like to take more a Phil Donahue style approach to these issues and to examine them more in-depth in order to come to a solution that the community can use to solve all of its problems in 1 hour or less.
#3) When we say object, we mean OBJECT The reason we just don’t say Please submit your article is because we don’t only just do articles here. We didn’t a lot as much space on this server because we’re closterphobic. Tomarken uses the word object because we accept music, art, movies, talkies, and anything that I cannot explain using the English language that lies in between. The man to talk to about this of course is our very own Moderator of the Real Richard Tebrick. That’s what he’s there for…use him or you may as well lose him as they saw…he is reachable through our submit@tomarken.com feature.
#4. Tomarken Business Cards For those who have obtained Intervalist status or for those who would like to achieve this designation, personalized tomarken.com business cards can be made available to you for about $1 for 10. Please email beckmann@tomarken.com if you are interested to see if you are indeed el-li-gible.
And now…after two months and while I am looking back to assess this entire situation of what has happened here, I am amazed with what we all have accomplished. While there has been some uncertainty in many circles as to “What Audience we are trying to attract here” and “What is our grand purpose”-this is actually the way that I indeed wanted it to play out all along. People have risked a great deal here already. We have all managed to avoid the hopefully soon to be universally disposed “zero-sum gain”. And most important of all we have already begun to see the positive effects of ‘mutually beneficial’ ‘non-heinious self-promotion’. Thank you all for your continued support and please hold yourselves and especially myself accountable to my promise that in the coming months the scope this venture will expand as new and farther reaching contributors will be assimilated into our efforts. We still have a great(infinate) deal of educating to do…but lets not get all stressed out, today is a happy ocasion.
