New retro-style animated ad with Santa out. Here.

A Brazilian ice cream company called Kibon has come up with a cold - I mean cool - idea: sell special Fruttare popsicles with a free iPod shuffle frozen inside. In fact, Kibon is giving away 10,000 of them ice cold shuffles in their iPod No Palito promo.

Before you iPod experts jump up in protest that a shuffle can’t survive being frozen inside a popsicle even if you seal it in plastic because of the humidity, relax.

Kibon studied the situation and invented a fake ice cream that doesn’t damage the iPod shuffle. The faux popsicle, or propsicle, is safe for shuffles, and Kibon had to get the approval of Cupertino before they could go ahead with the promo in Brazil, which is currently in the throes of their summer.

The shuffle is in random propsicles, and buyers can’t tell if there is an iPod in there or not. They buy a Fruttare popsicle in one of the ten fruit flavors and take a chance if they can get a shuffle or not. Mentor Muniz Neto of Bullet Brazil, the agency that cooked - er, froze up this promo, explains how the iPods stay safe in the popsicle:

We developed a special prototype that emulates the real ice cream; it protects the iPod from humidity, and it feels like the real ice cream. It is virtually impossible to fell the difference without opening the package.”

The manual and charger can be claimed separately by calling in a code to an 800 number to get them.

Coolness.

For joy! Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the Mac from Aspyr Media started shipping today, and marks the first time this particular franchise is available for, uh, playing on Macintoshes. And just in time for the holidays!

Long a runaway hit with nearly every platform except the Mac, it’s basically the Dance Dance Revolution model as interpreted for musicians, where you play lead guitar for a rock band and hit notes of famous rock songs in the right sequence, pretending you’re playing guitar. You play in concerts or head-to-head with legends of rock like Slash. It’s complicated to explain - you’d need to see it being played to appreciate it. Believe me, it’s more fun than jumping around on a vinyl mat, let me tell you. Even South Park devoted a whole episode to the phenomenon several weeks ago.

Already released for Windows earlier, the Mac version of GH3:LoR ships on a new hybrid Mac-PC disc (make sure you’re buying the right kind now), and comes with a scaled-down USB guitar-shaped controller called the X-Plorer. The song selections are even more fun than the previous two versions, and there are even boss battles now.

GH3:LoR for the Mac and the PC sells for US$79.99.

Yesterday I came across something so tasteless and crude yet so brilliantly funny at the same time that it had me ROTFL that I can’t resist linking to it.

It’s a point by point comparison of the iPhone versus the Nokia E70 done in the most scandalous way possible. There are days when I want to do this kind of a review in my magazine, and to see something so gleefully done is such a purgative experience it seems cathartic.

You might have seen it before, but it’s new to me. It’s got foul language and rude pictures galore, so don’t show this to your boss or kids now.

Readers with delicate sensibilities can just not click.

Charlie Sheen and Jenny McCarthy in last week’s episode of Two & A Half Men.