If you’ve been surfing the web this week you probably saw this video of this contestant, Caitlin, guessing a puzzle using only one letter:

Esquire profiled her afterwards which included this other fantastic game show gem when Terry Kniess, on The Price is Right, won both showcase showdowns with a perfect guess. (video of his guess after the jump)

If that isn’t enough, all these game show antics reminded me of Ohio native Michael Larson on Press Your Luck in 1984. He hit 35 squares in a row by memorizing the patterns and accumulated $110,237 in about an hour! It’s a fantastic story and you can watch video of it here.

Great stuff huh? For more great stuff, here’s this week’s roundup!
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Every few weeks a random person usually emails me with their latest list of “best frugal bloggers” or “best personal finance bloggers” and I usually ignore them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good superlative or two, it’s just that these lists often have an ulterior motive. That said, I didn’t respond that way when the guys at Money Crashers unveiled their top PF blogs list, which looked quite similar to Wise Bread’s more venerable Top 100 personal finance blogs list. The two are similar but not the same, each using a different equation to calculate awesomeness, but I’m honored that Bargaineering appears in the top ten of both.

Here are this week’s gems:
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As this article posts we should be on our way home from Pittsburgh after the last wedding of the 2010 wedding season. We’ve seen a lot of our friends pair up this year, with a few pairs still scheduled for next year, and it’s been a lot of fun celebrating but draining because of all the travel. Weddings are ridiculously fun and I enjoy them immensely, don’t get me wrong, but the amount travel can start to wear on you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally worth it, but it’d be nice to have a few consecutive weekends at home just to relax, catch up on some projects, and spend more time just relaxing and enjoying a Sunday afternoon of football.

This is completely unrelated to weddings, that is the nature of these roundups, but if you’re a fan of Jon Stewart, here’s an entertaining interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air where they discuss a plethora of issues including the upcoming October 30th rallies.

Here are a few articles I’ve found interesting this past week:
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The last few weeks, the frugal world has been buzzing about how Mark Boyle lived an entire year without cash. It’s was more about sustainability and reducing waste than living without cash, but I think it’s was a pretty valuable social experiment. It reminded me of a more “important” Super Size Me type of experiment.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

Interesting stuff… here are a few more interesting things I read the last few weeks:
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GM announced this week that the Chevrolet Volt’s battery will be guaranteed for 100,000 miles or eight years. That’s a long time to warranty anything, let alone a lithium-ion battery that is expected to power the car for up to 40 miles (more than other gas/electric hybrids).

Electric and hybrid cars are back in the news lately not because of rising gas prices, though they will certainly go back up soon, but because of Tesla’s sizzling hot IPO in late June. It surged, sank, and now sits around $20 a share after opening at $17. The roadsters are pretty sexy looking cars but at $100,000 a piece, it’s unlikely to find a wider audience. They’re coming out with a more mainstream car and investors are looking to latch onto that.

We both drive conventional gasoline cars and maybe one day we’ll go to hybrid or electric.

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It’s been insanely hot this past week as the thermometer has routinely broken 100 degrees in the Baltimore Washington area. We’ve been fortunate in that we live in an area where blackouts and brownouts, even as air conditioners are running full blast, are rare but the temperatures have just been unbearable. I don’t know what’s worst, the temperature or the humidity, walking outside is like being waterboarded!

A few tips on how to keep cool followed by our links for the week:

• Take advantage of other people’s A/C… and by other people I mean the local mall.
• Cook outside if you can, such as on the grill, or using the microwave to keep your home cooler. Avoid using burners and definitely avoid the oven.
• Eat cool dishes, rather than hot ones.
• Line dry clothes, you don’t need your dryer competing with your air conditioning.
• Only cool the rooms you use. If you live in a house and can block off some vents, do so when you have central air on. If you use an room-sized AC unit, stick it in the room you’ll be in.
• Use the fan. A fan works by blowing your body heat away from you, so you don’t need it on when you aren’t around. You can use it to exhaust hot air from a room by blowing it outside and create natural circulation in your home.
• Drink lots of water to stay hydrated!
• Limit your time outdoors, the sun can significantly sap your strength.

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A couple years ago Andrew from Sumo Lounge sent us a Sultan SumoSac and one of their Omni Bean Bag Chairs. It turns out that our little buddy Tobey (our beagle) has claimed the Sultan SumoSac, thinking it’s his very own dog bed (one of the largest dog beds every).

Fortunately, Sumo added yet another chair to their bean bags lineup and Andrew emailed me to ask if I wanted to try it out. It’s the Sumo Sway and a step up from their previous designs because it has more defined structure that offers support. In addition to a more defined shape, there is a little pocket on the side for you to stick your remotes in, a nice added touch.

Finally, I really like the suede material they used for this bag. It’s soft and comfortable, without getting too hot, and seems like it’ll stand up to wear and tear fairly well (just a guess, I’ve only had the bag for a week). A photo and the links of the week after the jump.

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It’s been a while since Bargaineering has been in a somewhat active “blog network” but I’m happy to announce that we’ve joined the Yakezie, an informal group of personal finance bloggers looking to help each other out. I sometimes miss the camaraderie of the blog networks in the past so I hope will bring some of that back. If nothing else, it’ll be fun!

Also, if you’re an aficionado of home remodeling, you need to check out my friend Fred’s Home Renovation Before and After Contest. You need to share your home renovation project story, submit some pictures, and starting June 20th they’ll select one winner each Sunday. Winner gets a $50 gift card to Lowes, Home Depot, or Amazon and they make a $100 donation to Habitat for Humanity. If you did a renovation, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enter this contest.

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I don’t follow baseball extremely closely, not until after the All-Star break anyway, but this past week Armando Galarraga was robbed of a Perfect Game. A Perfect Game, and I use capitals because it’s only been done 20 times in the history of baseball (two of those, Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay, have come this year), is where the opponent is held to no hits, no runs, and your team has committed zero errors.

Armando Galarraga, pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was one out away when Jason Donald was called safe at first base on not-that-close call. Unfortunately on replay, and to some in the stands, it didn’t look close at all. First base Umpire Jim Joyce later admits that he missed it and apologized to Galarraga. To his credit, Galarraga took it very well and acted very professionally about the situation.

All in all, it’s a pretty crappy result.

Here are some gems from this past week:
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The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just keeps on going (though it’s down to a smaller leak)… it’s been spilling since the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 21st. Since then, oil has been “leaking” out at a staggering rate. These pictures are just sad. The effects of this disaster will be felt for decades. In Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez spilled millions of crude twenty years ago, the herring have yet to return.

In other news…
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