Peace agreement brokered in Middle East, fifteen powers agree to permanent ceasefire after Brooklyn teen “cleans house” listening to self-help tapes

TEL AVIV – The thirty-centuries-old internecine strife between Arab and Jew came to a grinding halt today as what is hailed as the greatest peace agreement of all time was brokered – by a fourteen-year-old from Brooklyn. Only a few weeks after the storied IDF Major General and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 87, died not far from his boyhood home in the citrus groves of Kfar Malal, and a decade after the death of the Sharon-styled “irrelevant” PLO leader Yasir Arafat, the heads of state of Israel, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and ten other Middle Eastern powers covenanted for peace this past week in this Israeli town whose name means ”Hill of Spring.” Succeeding where a dozen presidents, prime ministers, and kings have failed for 66 years, the most incredible part of the unprecedented peace agreement is its broker, who is neither lawyer nor soldier, politician nor statesman. Instead, he is an honors student at P.S. 96 who works at a JCC Laundromat three times a week.

“I think it was the motivational tapes that gave me the strength to see it through,” said Carlos Linstrom, 14, of Brooklyn Heights. “I never really used to be the assertive type, but since I got this deluxe Do it Now! Package for kids, things have really turned around for me.” Lindstrom is referring to self-help guru Shallini Cox’s explosive video, audio, and print series, which have been styled as a medley of positive-thinking and behavioral modification popularized by David Hasselhoff, Anna Nicole Smith, Florence Henderson, and Sherman Helmsley. “I got them initially as a Christmas present,” Linstrom said. “I didn’t think much of them at the beginning, but after listening to them for five or six thousand hours, I started to see things,” he said. “Obviously the first steps were to pick up Arabic, Hebrew, French, Russian, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashtun,” he said. “That took me almost a month, because I had a science project due. Then I had to create a brief sketch of the major military conflicts of the region, all the way from the 1948 War of Independence to the era of Sharon’s noctural reprisal raids, and then on through the Yom Kippur War, the Oslo Accords, and the Netanyahu era,” he said. “Finally came the ultimate test of statecraft: getting the attention of the leaders of these fifteen powers, as well as the United States,” he said. “My dad sort of works with the government, so I thought I might start there,” Linstrom said. “His company does the plumbing for the UN building.”

Realizing he’d need more of an edge to get the peace process rolling, Linstrom decided eventually it was time to play hardball. “I decided to start a weblog of my own,” Linstrom said. “I called it www.heyletsstopfightingandstartlovinginthemiddleeast.com. Then I started posting all of my ideas, and finally I got hold of some high officials in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. At the same time, someone in the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia bit, and I knew I’d gotten a minyan for my Mid-east coffee klatch,” he said. “Using an algorithm to link to Shar’ia-approved swimwear sites didn’t hurt either, I’m sure,” he said.

What about the origins of the agreement itself? ”My buddy Harold Pinsky is good at English – he gets As on all his papers,” Linstrom said. “I had him write the agreement, and his mom looked it over. She’s a paralegal,” he said.

Linstrom isn’t sure what his next project will be, although he indicated an interest in the world of high finance. “I did tons of espionage research, and I did come across some cool stuff,” Linstrom said. “For example, there’s this book called Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. I thought it would be filled with shoe escape kit, 007-type stuff, but it’s mostly filled with accounting and securities fraud cases,” he said. “There are some decent spy stories in it, though, and the author connects them to the financial fraud cases. I might need money, so I’m going to start playing with this stuff, I think,” he said. “Even if I win a Nobel Peace Prize, I think my mom has to watch the money until I’m 18, so I’m not done taking care of towels at the JCC just yet,” he said.

Tradecraft can be found here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

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CNY author offers behind-the-scenes look at outstanding literary success; explains method behind achieving #822,136- and 1,023,499-best ranked status on Amazon

 SYRACUSE – Despite its charming four-seasons allure, highly affordable cost of living, and outstanding school districts, this Central New York gem isn’t exactly a ground-zero target for literary plaudits. Victor Hugo never set foot here. Dante Alighieri is as much a stranger to it as Marvin Martian. Proust, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare – none of the plots or characters in their glorious array of story indicate any knowledge of the Salt City. To help remedy this alarming condition, CNY #822,136- and #1,023,499- ranked best-selling author Joel Redmond has decided to share with the Tradecraft blog some of his deepest literary secrets.

“The first trick is not to get weighed down too seriously with nonessentials like plot, character, setting, and theme,” Redmond said. “Basically, I get a burrito, start the stopwatch on my cell phone, and write like Jackson Pollack paints for twenty minutes.” When pressed as to the source of his muse, Redmond sank into a reverie. “I remember hearing this great quote by Woody Allen,” he said. “He said something like ‘I’m all for speed-reading, I get a lot out of it. I speed-read War and Peace, for example, and I can tell you from that it definitely had something to do with Russia.’ It takes guts to read like that, and that’s why I try to write like that,” Redmond said.

Other tips? “I try to always write so I’m almost lying down,” Redmond said. “If you’re too tense, you might say something that will offend someone, and one of your characters might do something interesting,” he said. “I try to make sure all my work reads like a brokerage research report from an analyst who is very, very uncertain of his situation,” Redmond said. “I often nod off in the middle of writing a particularly inspiring passage, and it’s any writer’s hope that his readers experience the same things he does,” Redmond said. “And if there’s nothing good on TV that night, that doesn’t hurt, either.”

Redmond saw overnight success with his April 2011 release of The One-Minute Financial Planner, released by Xlibris; the book sold 7 copies worldwide its first week alone. In December 2013, Unlimited Publishing released the critically-acclaimed-by-Mr. Redmond follow-up work Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, which has already sold three copies a mere month into its publication. The final secret to his success? Giving away something for nothing. “I’m posting the original version of Tradecraft online in a weblog called The Bricklebrit Algorithm,” Redmond said. “It’s basically my way of becoming a TV finance personality without calling all my readers ‘girlfriend’ or hitting a ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ button that sounds like an air raid siren.” And the value to readers? “They’ll find lots of math formulas and to-dos to get wealthy that they can read about and never do, because they're presumably only fluent in English,” Redmond said. “But if they do get wealthy somehow by accidentally implementing some of the advice in there, I can’t be held responsible,” Redmond said. “I have to go now, though. Stopwatch says 24:16,” he said.

Tradecraft can be found here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

The blog is found at http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thebricklebritalgorithm.

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Blog book earns universal acclaim for "uglifying" finance, explaining ten pages' material in two hundred

'I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. 'What is it?'

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. 'What! Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. 'You know what to beautify is, I suppose?'

'Yes,' said Alice doubtfully: 'it means--to--make--anything--prettier.'

'Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, 'if you don't know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.'

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 

SYRACUSE - Are you convinced finance isn't complicated enough? Are you tired of the excessive simplicity of things like variable annuity prospectuses, the fine print on reverse mortgages, or the taxation of derivatives? Do you believe the world of finance needs to be "uglified," as in the quote above? Most importantly, do you have a desire to maybe potentially become wealthy over a very long time? Then you might have some use for Joel Redmond, a financial planner in this Central New York town whose balmy six degree mornings are gloriously reminiscent of Vladivostok's this time of year. Redmond, who works at an area private bank as a wealth strategist, has just released a weblog with ninety separate financial lessons in it called The Bricklebrit Algorithm.

"I wanted to make sure I continued to enjoy the comforting bosom of total obscurity," Redmond said when asked if he was concerned Google and other search engines would have trouble finding a blog actually titled The Bricklebrit Algorithm. "I mean, people spend all this time agonizing about what to call something, and they want to make sure people can spell it so they can find it on the Internet.I remember a Doonesbury interview Garry Trudeau wrote up with David Halberstam, the great author. Someone asked him, 'What do you do?' And he said, 'I write books. Big books, huge books. The kind of books about which people like to say, 'I own them.' 'Oh. Do these people read them?' 'Very few. Only the best,' Halberstam said. And I knew right away that would be my model," Redmond said.

The weblog, whose original title The Sphincterdinckel Heliodrome was rejected by most New York publishing houses as too conventional, has a priceless ability to bring back the special sensation of being back in a university classroom with "that statistics teacher who spoke extremely halting English, with occasional verbal ejaculations characteristic of Tourette's, but in financial-ese. Most people try and take complicated things and make them simple. What good is that?" Redmond asked. "What takes real talent is to produce 500 pages dedicated to the decision-making process behind a squirrel crossing the road, with equations, graphs, footnotes, and point-and-figure charts. Now, if you can do that - you've got something worth sharing," he said. "Better yet, add some Latin into the mix."

The weblog, which offers three to-do items at the end of each post to help readers implement the blog's principles on ways to become wealthy, comes with an ironclad guarantee, Redmond said. "I feel so strongly about this blog that I offer the absolute guarantee that it would last over one hundred pages single spaced on 8 1/2" by 11" paper using 12 point Times New Roman font if you printed it out," he said. "It may even be more."

According to Redmond, who this writer has observed talking to himself and then, when interrupted, says "I wasn't talking to you - I was addressing the House of Commons," the blog has helped him in his relationships with his peers and friends. "It's true," Redmond said. "Instead of devising a multiple linear regression to determine when I should use the blue toothbrush vs. the green toothbrush, and how many minutes to devote each day to ESPN and how many to devote to Glenn Ford movies, I've learned that not every single thing in life can be handled with an equation," Redmond said. "I have to go now, though. It's 10:30, and I have to get at least 425 minutes of sleep tonight," he said. "I've only gotten a median of 407.25 minutes for the past 75 days, with a 2% margin of error at a 5% confidence level. I need to bring that up or I'm well behind most 42-year-old nonsmoker white males living at 42.5 degrees north latitude with two housecats."

The blog can be found here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thebricklebritalgorithm