While Stella usually indulges my laziness by combing through the financial blogs and picking out our weekly roundup on her own, I thought I'd try something new this week and scrounge around for them myself. The result of this was lots of sports-related stories!

I challenge you, readers, to find any semblance of a theme for this week's roundup. Stella warned me it would be tough, and she was right. I've got nothing!

So let's forge ahead:

I've been elected to write this week's "Home Sweet Home" edition of Herding Cats--which is fitting, because I do indeed live at and work from home. Since today is All Hallow's Eve Eve, it was also fitting that we feature a few stories about ghosts.

Read on...if you dare!

If you know anything about the Savings.com blog, you know that we love our LOLcats. I'm pretty sure there have been times that we've written posts specifically so we can use something amazing we found on "I Can Has Cheezburger." But in the spirit of fairness to the other most common domesticated animal, stella.louise has decided that this week's roundup should be (mostly) canine-themed.

I know, I know--it's an outrageous and atrocious betrayal, so I just wanted to let you know that I took no part in this decision. I'll try my best to be stoic.

We chose to forgo the usual overarching theme for this week's roundup and bring you stories from all over the place. Stay tuned to learn about a couple of hot new products for the holiday season, some valuable savings tips, and how you can leave a certain Florida strip club healthier than when you came:

If you're reading this, there's roughly a 9.7% chance you don't have a job (that's the current national unemployment rate). It's as depressing as it is inevitable here in the bottoming-out phase of the recession, so to help you folks out, we've geared this week's links toward ways to escape the dark clutches of unemployment.

I give you our favorite savings stories of the week, the employment edition!

I'm not sure how, but the themes of our picks this week turned out to be food, crime, and how they sometimes intertwine. If you want to be Orwellian you could call that "FOODCRIME."

Sounds sinister. I don't want any part of it.

Behold our favorite finance stories for this week:

Just because I think Macs are a colossal waste of money doesn't mean I wasn't paying close attention to yesterday's Apple announcements--because I pretty much worship everything else this company makes. My iPod, an original video model (I guess it's an "iPod Classic" now), is still going strong after its fourth birthday, and I'll be buying an iPhone the instant AT&T extends or lets go of their exclusivity (just in case Verizon joins the party and saves me the trouble of switching networks).

Steve Jobs announced a video camera for the 5th-generation iPod nano and a software update for the iPhone 3GS, but my focus was definitely on the new features of iTunes 9:

On Monday you heard from Loren, our CEO, about how you can help take the wind out of the sails of scammy advertisers. He offered this basic guideline for weeding through the multitude of messages that bombard us everyday:

Question: Which companies are spending the most on advertising?

Answer: The ones that are making the most money off of you.

This week's roundup is in the same vein, and should give you some more useful knowledge of how to avoid getting had:

As a kid I never thought I'd be jealous of everyone who got to go back to school at the end of August. Granted, it isn't the academic aspects I miss, but more so the free beer during Pre-Rush and the sight of shapely USC co-eds around campus. Alas! I'm now an "adult," and my attention has turned to adult concerns: in this case, earning my keep here at Savings.com by compiling your weekly round-up of Savings Stories, the "Dollar and Zens" edition:

Even when you've only been a college graduate for 3 months, looking back on those four years of your life evokes a powerful sense of nostalgia. Some of my friends spent that time being voluntarily swamped with work from challenging majors, and others took advantage of the fact that until you put on that mortarboard, you're technically not an alcoholic. The one thing most of us have in common is that college was a time when we turned cheapness into an art form and learned to get by on as little money as possible.

For me that was especially true; although my scholarship spared my parents and me from being haunted by the specter of student loans until the year 2030, it made me ineligible for campus work study jobs and left me bereft of spending money.

Here are some of the things I learned from four years of being an academic peasant:

Much like we've seen with gas prices, the recession can be your friend when it comes to baseball ticket prices, too.

Major League Baseball was certainly grateful when the recession waited until the end of the 2008 season to rear its ugly head. Despite attendance dipping about 1% from 2007, America's wealthiest sport saw its revenues climb half a billion dollars. Luckily for sports fans, that trend will not continue.

By the beginning of the 2009 season, most teams had already downed the proverbial stiff drink and prepared to offer creative ways for their fiscally weary fans to enjoy an affordable trip to the ballpark.