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

• It's finally official: Guillermo del Toro will indeed be directing the movies based on The Hobbit. Hoorah! (Via Ross)
• America, prepare to be stimulated even earlier than you expected! Btw, we hear the government is considering following up the free money with some free bread and circuses. (Via Sarah)
• Warren Ellis has the normal collection of weird, interesting, and mind-blowing stories today. We were already afraid of China, and now the nation has surpassed the US to become the world’s largest Internet-using population. But... the internet belongs to America! Meanwhile, Russia is planning to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft that are too big to build planetside. But... space belongs to America! Microsoft is developing a muscle-computer interface that takes the form of an armband worn on the forearm that recognises finger movements by monitoring muscle activity. Yes, that's right: your muscles belong to America. And finally, a study has found that geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk. That's just creepy. The Earth is getting back at us by making us kill ourselves.
• Poor Wesley Snipes. We were sure he'd get the usual slap on the wrist reserved for celebrities, but in fact they gave him the maximum sentence of three years in prison for his tax-dodging ways! Some might point out that there was a larger miscarriage of justice carried out this morning, however.
• Disney just got done saying there'd only be three Narnia films, and now they're already looking for a director for the fourth movie. WTF?
• Dude—check out the sweet new Dark Knight poster.
• We're sure you already know that if you mix Mentos and Diet Coke, the result is a foaming soda volcano. Well, 1,500 students in Leuvan, Belgium attempted to break the previous record when each of them created a Mentos/Coke fountain simultaneously. Click through for the awesome photos. (Via Sarah, via SlashFood)
• You may have already heard that Arby's bought Wendy's. But we still can't seem to figure out whether this means Wendy's will be gone for good, or whether their food will now be served in Arby's, or what the hell is going to happen. Can anybody tell us whether we will still be able to get a Baconator or not?! (Via Sarah)

• Jack Thompson wrote a letter comparing Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick to the Hitler Youth, and attributing the deaths of three Alabama policemen, along with "a recent plethora of cop killings," to entries in the Grand Theft Auto series. The letter is addressed to Zelnick's mother, but Thompson claims he sent it to Zelnick's attorney. Regardless of whom it was sent to, the letter (which you can read in its entirety here) is just as hateful and insane as we've come to expect.
• *snort* Pants with a built-in keyboard! We could make a joke about surfing for porn with your keyboard pants, but... we're sure you can come up with one on your own.
• Before the Speed Racer movie opens in theaters, Target will begin selling a 20-minute standalone faux documentary about the fictional Racer family. Heh. That's a cute idea.
• Game|Life readers have chosen the surprisingly ugly and inaccurate original NES box art for Mega Man to be the worst video game box art gaffe ever.
• Another fun new typing game is here: TypeRacer! You compete against other random folks by typing quotes from movies. The faster you type, the faster your car moves, so if you type the fastest, you win the race. This Phillyist just won a race by typing a quote from Juno at 96 wpm. Exhilarating. (Via)
• What They Play had some young kids, under condition of anonymity, tell them how they planned to get their hands on a copy of GTA IV, despite their age and the game's rating. Fascinating. (Via)
• Iron Man director Jon Favreau already knows where he wants to go with sequels of the film. Apparently he dropped hints about his plans in the first movie. But we don't know much more about it, because we had to stop reading for fear of spoilers.
• Yoko Ono is suing the producers of Ben Stein's pro-intelligent design documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed for using John Lennon's "Imagine" in the film.
• JoBlo has some new stills from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening—and don't worry, they're spoiler-free. (Via)
• For some reason it makes perfect sense to us that Crispin Glover has signed to star in a movie about the Donner Party.
• Some guy integrated a Wii remote into a toy AK-47 in order to pistol whip bunnies, then put it on YouTube. The world is a beautiful place.
• Sadly we didn't have time to go over to New York the other day and get Mario to hail a cab for us, but apparently Joystiq did, as they have video and pictures! It looks like Mario needed help actually hailing the cabs as well as, you know, walking and stuff, but he still attracted many female admirers. What a guy!

Image Credit: Flickr user Schlüsselbein2007