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.

###

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.

###

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

                                                                          

World’s largest business networking site crashes under unbearable volume of self-improvement materials

PALO ALTO – The Information Age suffered a significant setback today, as Joind.com president and CEO Elina Lampert said the site was closing down for the next six weeks to upgrade its servers and networking hardware. Lampert attributed the cause of the e-gridlock to an “unprecedented” amount of self-help books, e-learning courses, and other materials aimed at helping, basically, “anyone do anything, without any consideration whatsoever of whether it ought to be done or not.”

The site, which after its humble beginnings as just another Silicon Valley startup 7 years ago traded at $359 this week after a May 2011 IPO at $75, apparently incensed its 40 million+ estimated users with what appears to be a permanent posting of its all-too-well-known logo of a yellow “Men At Work” sign and hardhat, modifying its customary “we’ll have things back to normal momentarily” to “we’ll maybe hopefully have things back to normal in approximately six weeks.” 

“I can’t understand it,” said Tina Yardley, a 45-year-old mother of four from Seattle whose recent Fifty Pounds Lighter on Egg Yolks and Cake Batter reached #2 on the best-seller list in Kindle sales on Amazon.com. “My sales all came from Joind – every one of them. What am I supposed to do now?” Yardley was referring to her e-book Clogged Arteries Work Better!, which she gave away for free to her 17,000+ business contacts on the networking website and which was her sole portal to Yolks and Batter. 

But the purveyors of e-counsel weren’t the only ones grousing about the six-week glitch – the users were the hardest hit. Take the case of Tommy Simons, an eleven-year-old in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Simons, a nearsighted and papuliferous sixth-grader with a penchant for Hostess snack cakes and Popular Mechanics, said the site’s going down has “horrible” ramifications for his social life. “I don’t know what to do now,” said Simons. “I have seven girlfriends, but I never learned how to get rid of them,” he said. Simons, who memorized every word of the best-selling e-book How to Get Seventh- and Eighth-Grade Girls to get Bieber Fever – For You!, said he’ll now miss the release of the much-anticipated free follow-up e-tome Grade School Break-Ups Were Never so Easy. Nor is that Simon’s only problem, who also taught himself the best putdowns for eleven-year-olds to use in taverns, learned the five most effective Brazilian jiujitsu submission techniques, and established a worldwide import-export business in light armaments. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said.

Some authors are making the best of the situation. Among them is Joel Redmond, the author of a new book on selecting profitable investments and detecting accounting chicanery. Redmond, a Central New York financial planner with over 1,700 connections on the site, says he isn’t all that worried about the six-week hiatus. “I kind of look at Joind.com as a place where you can make up for not having enough people signing your yearbook in high school,” he said. “Do you know how cool it feels to have people from Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad saying nice things about you, especially when they don’t know anything about you at all? Bonus,” Redmond said.

Redmond’s book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, was released on Cyber Monday of this year on Amazon.com. Asked if he felt as though he contributed to the Joind.com e-debacle, he waxed bemused. “I don’t really post links to the book on Joind,” Redmond said. “Joind is more of a place where I collect endorsements I mostly haven’t earned from people I mostly don’t know, and hesitantly offer them in return to make the system work faster so my computer won’t crash,” he said. “Facebook and Twitter are for the book, mostly so my family and friends can say witty things like ‘what’s it like writing a best-smeller?’ and wheedle their way into some free copies.”

And what about Redmond’s e-learning mission? “I don’t really follow a lot of that stuff,” he said. “I sort of have a rule that if the author hasn’t been dead fifty years, she’s not all that interesting to me yet.”

The book Tradecraft is available at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

###

Tradecraft “dangerous to financial democracy,” reviewers say

Sir:

We are writing this missive to you in grave and united protest regarding your new book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. Not only are your conclusions factually inaccurate, but some of the allegations made in your book are libelous, defamatory, fractious, and patently dangerous to financial democracy.

Your book claims that the officers of public companies are mountebanks and charlatans bent on gaming financial statements, riding the low roads to the gold-paneled safe deposit boxes of corporate boardrooms on the bending backs of the poor old worker hacks they employ. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we were offered a median amount of $50 million in additional stock options and equity compensation at the end of this fiscal year, not a one of us agreed without the most serious introspection and deliberation. We thought about it for many minutes. Some of us spent the better part of an hour on the matter. And, while we entertained the thought of refusing the packages, we only accepted them under the most extraordinary sense of responsibility to our shareholders. Self-denial, and only self-denial – not the Neronian excesses you seem fond of alluding to in your book – induced us to accede to these utterly well-merited compensation arrangements, which must surely be of the most minute consequence in the face of the profits our respective firms make. In fact, one of our firm’s stocks has actually broken even since we were appointed CEO. Several more are only slightly (5-35%) below where they were when we assumed leadership.

One of the most serious allegations in your monograph is an alarum for greater transparency in corporate financial statements. Tell me, Mr. Redmond – what good does it do to educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated? Why tell a man that his wife is cheating on him, even if she is? Why tell a 300-pound man he should stop eating so much or he’ll get heart disease? And why, why, why on earth should anyone ever tell investors that, in their own interests, sometimes our accounting teams need to “get surgical” with our financial reporting and make sure our “Miss Corporate” contestants have enough mascara for the judges – our auditors? We urge you, Mr. Redmond, to listen to the voice of reason, and accept the reality of the new financial reporting. It’s here to stay – and so are we!

Sincerely, The architects of every financial and accounting scandal in US history

Central New York man ecstatic about meteoric rise from #2,540,175- to #1,745,833- ranked best-selling author on Amazon.com

SYRACUSE – When 42-year-old Joel Redmond, a lifelong native of this sleepy college backwater known more for its DomeDogs and annual snowfall than its contribution to literary blockbusters, looked at his Author Central page on Amazon this past Thursday, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“It seemed the books were flying off the shelves so fast I couldn’t believe it,” Redmond said. “My ranking was over 2.5 million at midday, and then when I checked it again at 7:30 that night, I’d risen to just under 1.75 million. This is a game-changer,” Redmond said. “My audience literally may have just gone from one dozen to several dozen – who knows? Maybe tens of dozens,” Redmond said.

Redmond, a private bank financial planner with less liquid net worth than most parish priests, said he never intended to create the financial version of The Hunger Games. Asked about his literary research and writing process, he became unduly ebullient. “I’ts not that easy being modest,” he said. “No one in my family has ever become a #1,745,833 best-selling author before.” Pressed about his writing method, he hesitantly elaborated. “I remembered reading this quote by Dave Barry,” he said. “He said something like, ‘Most writers get all hung up on fact-checking, the story-line, and making sure what they write is accurate, which is really pretend writing, when you think about it. Real writing is sitting down and making up stuff from your head, which is what I do.’ And that’s been my inspiration,” he said.

Redmond, whose book is called The One-Minute Financial Planner, said it became available on Amazon.com in November 2011. Since then, according to Amazon, he has sold 11 copies of the book, which is available in softcover, hardcover, and e-book editions.

“My senior partner at my previous firm bought five, and then I think he got three more,” Redmond said. “My manager paid the publisher $2,200 to publish. We gave them away so people would listen to us help manage their money. Actually, he may have bought four more,” Redmond said. “I think he kept his water bottle on a copy – I’m not sure we ever unloaded them all.” That wasn’t the best part, though, Redmond said.

“It was the royalties – I would get $15, and then three months would go by and I’d get another $12. For awhile the money just kept coming and coming,” he said.

What’s next for this up-and-coming Michael Lewis? “I’m not sure, but I did just release another book,” Redmond said. “It’s called Tradecraft, and it’s also available on Amazon in softcover and e-book versions.” But the best news of all is yet to come: Redmond saw it when he checked his Author Central page for the third time.

“I saw the rankings for Tradecraft, and apparently I went up to #228,234,” Redmond said. “This is the most unbelievable thing that’s happened to me yet, since winning that $25 from the lottery ticket my co-worker gave me last month.” 

The website for Tradecraft is at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond. 

###