Big ups to Jeff over at the Sustainable Life Blog for including my post, "Brother, can you spare a swipe? Contactless card reading guitar unveiled," in this week's Carnival of Personal Finance.

My post, which details a wireless, touchless credit card accepting guitar by Barclays, is nuzzled into the ever-popular theme of Labor Day. Because what says Labor Day more than a raggedy bum asking for change and strumming "Like A Rolling Stone" in the corner of a busy intersection? Well ... maybe that's not the best example.

The holiday, according to the carnival, is "dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers." So congratulate yourself, kick up your feet and head on over to the carnival for a short history of Labor day and loads of great personal finance articles. At least I think he was talking about the item, not me.

Have you ever had the strong urge to give your hard-earned money to someone strumming "Dust in the Wind" out of key at a vacant intersection? Well, neither have I. But London-based issuer Barclays hopes our apprehension will disappear with its new approach to street charity: a wireless, touchless, credit card accepting guitar.

The financial institution unveiled the instrument Thursday, Aug. 26, in London during a publicity stunt promoting its "contactless technology." People passing by a street musician -- known as a "busker" in the UK -- were handed prepaid cards loaded with £5 and were instructed to wave it near the head of the guitar. The money was then taken off the card and donated to the Help a London Child charity.

Contactless cards aren't exclusive to Barclays's, but they all work the same: By using radio-frequency identification, or RFID. The card data is stored in a chip inside the plastic and is transmitted using short-range electromagnetic waves emitted by the contactless-card reader. Tollbooths, garage door openers and workplace ID fobs are a few devices that use RFID technology today.

Jennifer Aniston's former beautician could be doing the hair and nails of a different type of clientele if convicted of stealing credit card information from a variety of A-list celebrities.

Maria Gabriella Perez, owner of the Beverly Hills salon Chez Gabriela Studio, was arrested Wednesday and accused of fraudulently charging hundreds of thousands of dollars on cards belonging to Aniston, Liv Tyler, Anne Hathaway and Melanie Griffith, according to court documents and news sources.

Records claim Perez charged about $280,000 to celebrity cards in just one year; $214,000 of that was charged on two of Tyler's American Express cards over a five-month period alone. The U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles says she initially got the card details by providing legitimate services, and later dug up the information and entered it manually for the fraudulent charges.

As the Internet grows, so does the amount of sensitive data floating around. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of usernames, passwords, dates of birth and yes, even credit card numbers drift around somewhere on this crazy thing we call "the Internet." And as those numbers grow, so does the risk of that data falling into the wrong hands.

So the U.S. government, the ol' watchdogs they are, wants to improve the security of your online information by creating an "identity ecosystem" through the use of personal identifiers. In a draft released June 25, 2010, the government proposed that Internet users create their own personal digital certificate or identity card to prove who they are before they complete an online transaction. The identifiers would be offered to consumers by online vendors.

We keep it real at CreditCards.com, and that's something I like to flaunt. We got tricked-out cubicles, doubled-stacked Google listings and a kitchen full of mad-legit noms. So mad-legit, in fact, that my co-worker and I decided to write a song or two about our employment.

Inside this blog post, you'll find the very first CreditCards.com EP. For those who don't know, EP stands for extended play, and contains more songs than a single, but not as much as a full-length album.

We made two songs: "CreditCards.com," which discusses credit card swag, SEO, iStock and everything else that makes our work so awesome, and "Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick," a sobering love ballad about a very important member of our team that sometimes goes missing.

We also took the time to craft a video for "CreditCards.com" so you could get a glimpse of what really goes on in our offices. It's full glistenin' rims, life sized credit card clothing, boardroom arguments, and lots of cameos of the editorial and marketing team. Check it out!

Lesbian sex, abortion, gay marriage and ... credit card debt.

That mixed bag of hot-button topics is just a small sampling of what's in Esquire's "Survey of American Women," released in May 2010 issue. The just-for-fun study complied the results of about 10,000 women that took the men's magazine survey online between Feb. 4 and March 3, 2010.

Most of the questions centered around relationships (If you knew you wouldn't be caught, would you cheat?), sex (If you were or are a lesbian, what celebrity would you sleep with?) and plain old hawtness (Who's the best looking man in America? Hint: See picture above.) But readers also got a small peak at the financial habits of today's Esquire-reading women.

Read on to see what the survey results.