Friday Links - Identity Theft and Fun with Asterisks Edition!

This doesn't have anything to do with this post,
but I found it on a meme site a few weeks ago,
and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what the
joke is.  I am hereby offering a reward to
whomever best explains the joke.*****

Making Sense of Cents questioned how much people like to spend on hotel rooms.  I'm definitely with her on the "I like to pay more so that I don't stay in hotels where mounds of hair greet me when I pull back the sheets" spectrum.

Girl with the Red Balloon wrote about how it's irritating when people give gifts.

Oh.  And then expect you to use them in a certain way.  I totally agree.  I've been using my Wii nunchuks as actual nunchuks to fight crime, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle style, since Christmas.  Suck it, Nintendo!

CBS Money Watch explained the advantages of credit versus debit cards.  This post hit close to home as somebody totally stole one of my credit card numbers, and used it to try to buy stuff online this week!  (I know that set up makes it sound like it didn't happen, but it really did).  Fortunately, Chase realized that I wasn't making the charges pretty quickly, but not before they, snickeringly, asked me the following question:

"Did you recently purchase $300 worth of items online from Bed, Bath, and Beyond?"

After a quick tug on my Y-chromosome to make sure it was still there, I assured them that I had not spent $300 at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.*  Chase even next-dayed my replacement card to me.

Finally, Jana at Daily Money Shot wrote about how she doesn't have a lot of self-confidence.  In all honesty, I totally feel her as I struggle with the same issues.  We can only take it one day at a time.**

*Having said that, I did spend a summer working at Linens 'n' Things while I was in college.***  Later, they went bankrupt.  Coincidence?
**Linking to Daily Money Shot is IN NO WAY MEANT TO APOLOGIZE for sending awkward tweets to Jana earlier this week in which I explained my original confusion as to the title of her site.
***While in general the job was okay (I got to feed the trash compactor by poking cardboard boxes that had been thrown into it with an ACTUAL TEN FOOT POLE and climb up on tall ladders), probably my least pleasant work memory occurred there.  As I came back to work after a day off, I was informed by my supervisor that somebody had smeared some poo around in one of the stalls in the women's restroom.  I was also told that this had happened the day before.  While I appreciate the fact that I was the low man on the totem pole and therefore was the one to do the grunt work, I thought (and think!) that it's a pretty jerk move to save a poo mess for somebody else the next day (by placing an "Out of Order" sign on the stall) instead of just cleaning it up.****
****Yes, I cleaned it up.
*****Perhaps it's not a logical joke at all.  For instance, my favorite joke in high school was "Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  A: Fishhhhhhhhh."******
******That's not actually my favorite joke from high school, but my favorite joke is too sexist for me to bring up here.  Alexa tells me that an overwhelming amount of my traffic comes from women who spent some time in college, and I oughtn't to bite the hands that feed me.  If my Y-chromosome comment didn't send you a-packing, that joke certainly would.