A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets.

• Google Maps is extremely helpful with directions, even when you're going across oceans (see step 23). (Via)
• A student was suspended in North Carolina because he came to school dressed as a pirate, and his costume was "disruptive." The student says the punishment is a violation of his rights, as his religion dictates that he must dress in "full pirate regalia." Yep, he's a Pastafarian. The Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on us all. (Via)
• M. Night Shyamalan has managed to get Mark Wahlberg signed to star in his next film. We continue to hope that it won't suck.
• Cinematical's got another list on AOL's Moviefone site; this time it's Movie Characters We'd Love to Date. Lots of great picks: Han Solo, the chick from Weird Science, Aragorn, Lloyd Dobler, Jessica Rabbit (rowr), Marion Ravenwood from Raiders, and, our favorite, Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. Myrna Loy is so ridiculously beautiful and cute and hilarious in those films. (Via)
• Another Dark Knight casting rumor: Sarah Michelle Gellar might be in it. Cinematical guesses she'll be Harley Quinn, which would be fun. Or they could do a cross-over with the Buffy universe! Okay, probably unlikely...
• Cinematical has a lovely gallery of new official photos from the upcoming Harry Potter film. Although...dude, Gary Oldman. Close your robe!!
• The Movie Blog presents us with their picks for 10 Best Comedies of All Time, and Worst Trailer in History. The trailer is for Are We Done Yet, the movie that will destroy any iota of cred that Ice Cube still had left. Seriously, this thing makes us want to vomit. We smell a future Most Likely to Suck! But anyway, the comedy list has some odd films on it, but some really excellent ones, too, such as Holy Grail, A Fish Called Wanda, Airplane!, Spaceballs, and This Is Spinal Tap. We'd probably add a couple Marx Brothers movies to it, though, like A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup.
• IGN has another fun list for us: the Top 25 Most Awesome Covers, by which they mean, the worst video game box art of all time. Our favorite one may be Night Trap, although Gauntlet is also pretty hilarious; it looks more like a legal statement than art that's supposed to convince you to buy a game. Oh, and we're sorry, but Ninja Golf looks freaking awesome to us. (Via)

More after the jump...

• Ahem. NEW MUSIC FROM DARKEST OF THE HILLSIDE THICKETS. Sorry for the all caps, but that's the way it looks in our mind when we think about it. We love those guys. Sadly, this particular mp3 is a bit messed up and cuts out about three minutes in, but dude says he'll fix it when he gets home from work. Regardless, what we've heard so far is awesome. Can't wait for the full album, The Shadow out of Tim.
• Norwegian Cruise Line is going to have Wii on their cruise ships! That you can play on a giant-ass screen! Why would you do anything else on the boat? Besides go to the all-you-can-eat midnight buffet, of course.
• We don't know if you heard, but there's a trailer online for Grand Theft Auto IV. Apparently everybody and his brother is watching it, so you'll have to wait through a lot of downloading and buffering to see the whole thing, but it's there. And it looks very pretty, but you won't learn anything else about the game besides its graphical capabilities from this video.
• Heh. Joystiq did a pretty hilarious test of two of the big karaoke games: Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2 and SingStar Pop. Both games include that one Britney Spears song about hitting school girls, so they painstakingly synced the games up and sang the song into two microphones at the same time to compare the rating and difficulty levels of the games. And yes, there is a video included, although you might want to mute the audio...
• The iTunes Music Store just released some new features: Complete My Album, and My Alerts. My Alerts shows you recently released work from artists whose music you've already bought. Complete My Album would definitely have come in handy for this Phillyist earlier; if you buy a few individual songs and then decide you want the whole album, you can use this feature to get a credit for the songs you've already purchased, thus receiving a discount on the album. Nice!
• YTMND strikes again! This time they've got Jack Bauer of 24 facing off against Riker of ST:TNG in a game of Street Fighter 2. The video is disappointingly short, especially for the long load time, and the music is frighteningly loud. Still, it's a clever concept. (Via)
• Yet another list: the ten worst movies based on TV shows. We actually kind of vaguely enjoyed Scooby Doo, but the rest of these are excellent choices. We remember vividly the moment when we realized that standing around in the bathroom at the movie theater was more fun than going back in and watching the rest of The Avengers. Also, Lost in Space is probably one of the worst movies ever made. (Via)
• The Europeans may be getting Grindhouse split into two separate features, which is lame, but they're also getting back some scenes that will be cut from the American version. Aw, man! Guess we'll have to wait for DVD to see the entire movie...

Image Credit: Flickr user kurtsik_