'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
Looks like an informative yet engaging piece - rare to find in financial writing.
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