Here we are again at the only time of year where you can get away with playing cheesy shmaltz without friends and family questioning your taste/sanity/sexuality. What, you have no Bing Crosby lying around at home? Don’t worry, there’s a solution.

I really should have mentioned Pandora before because it’s a fantastic way of finding new music or listening to the kind of music you like when you don’t have your collection to hand. This, of course, means you have endless access to as much Bing, Nat, Louis and, uh, Regis Philbin as you can possibly handle this holiday season. Here’s the trick from lifehacker.com:

Think of someone you’d like to hear some holiday cheer from, say, Bing Crosby. Tell Pandora you want to create a new station, but instead of just writing in the artist’s name, type in “Bing Crosby (holiday)”.

If you really want to show everyone what a Christmas mood you’re in, you can log your Pandora plays to your last.fm profile with the ingeniously named pandora.fm.

Go now, and enjoy that endless Christmas crooning!

Some fantastic short animated roughs here from animators including Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnson and Glen Keane.

Forgotten NY: Forgotten subway signs, advertisements, cemeteries, signs and more. Remnants of years past peeking through to today. (via Design Observer)

“In the spirit of capitalist Christianity and giving” John K has remastered the two minute George Liquor christmas cartoon short that Spumco released as a Flash cartoon in the late 90s into a new nicely rendered Quicktime version. It’s short, but sweet. It’s also just $1… which is 54p by today’s exchange rate, which means I really can’t complain that they didn’t bother to upgrade the crappy compressed sound quality! Buy it here at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium.

Hopefully this will mean John K and his team will be re-releasing more of the web cartoon stuff they produced ahead of their time.

I discovered today, via BoingBoing, the blog of 93 year old blogger Donald Crowdis: Don to Earth. If you haven’t read it before, I urge you to take a look. His writing very much reminds me of the late Alistair Cook.

CNNMoney warns of the perils of shopping for the Nintendo Wii at Christmas:

While paying at the register, the man handling the Wii’s said very loudly to the line full of people still waiting, “Sorry folks, that’s it. There’s no more for today.” Instantly I started hearing groans and seeing other disappointing gestures. It was then that I realized the position I was in…here I was in line with all these tense guys who didn’t get a game system and I did. All at once, I felt their angry, jealous eyes shift focus to me. To them, I was an easy target.

(via Voodoo Extreme)

Joe Barbera died yesterday at the age of 95. Joe Barbera was, of course, the co-founder of the Hanna-Barbera studios with Bill Hanna which was, more or less, created out of their Tom and Jerry cartoons and commercials while at MGM. The studio went on to produce much loved classics like The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and the Jetsons.

Cartoon Brew are collecting memories and tributes.

UPDATE: John K now has a great tribute over on his blog.

If you’re thinking of getting a vastly overpriced games console in the near future, or just fancy grabbing one of the very few things Sony offer for free, why not register your Playstation(R)Network ID now? You’ll need one of these when you get your Playstation3. (via The Guardian)

Chris Sanders fired from American Dog: I knew all about the layoffs at Disney last week, but I was totally unaware that Lilo and Stitch creator/director and Antikewl favourite Chris Sanders had been dropped from his project, American Dog. It’s very sad news but, as Cartoon Brew reports, may have been a blessing in disguise.

Designer Stefan Bucher has started a Daily Monster blog where he creates a new monster every day from an ink blot.

(via Cartoon Brew… again!)