Bullet Points: Valentine’s Day Edition

• Until YouTube puts the kibosh to it, there’s a full episode online of the 1957-1959 TV series The Thin Man, inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s novel of the same name. That NBC series starred Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk as Nick and Nora Charles. The episode available on YouTube is called “Asta Day” and recounts how their pet dog brought the detecting and drinking couple together. It comes in three parts, starting here. Enjoy!

• Kate Winslet in an HBO-TV adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1941 novel, Mildred Pierce? Couldn’t we just have been happy with the classic 1945 Joan Crawford movie made from that same book? Does everything have to be “updated”?

• The award-winning short-story writer known as Anonymous-9 is this week’s contributor to Beat to a Pulp. Her little hard-boiled tale, called “The Master Bedroom,” apparently began as “a nightmare, and took nearly two years and 150 drafts to convert to story form.”

• Paul D. Brazill interviews Patti Abbott, the Derringer Award-winning author and organizer of the Web’s now-established Friday “forgotten books series.”

• Do you know the true story behind the popular stage play, Arsenic and Old Lace? (Hat tip to The Writer’s Forensics Blog.)

• It seems Australian actor Alex O’Loughlin has been tapped to fill Jack Lord’s shoes in the CBS-TV remake of Hawaii Five-O. In case you’re wondering who O’Loughlin is, he evidently starred in the very short-lived paranormal detective-romance series Moonlight. TV Squad offers more on the new show’s casting and potential, while The HMSS Weblog has some trivia about the original series.

• How does failed half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin rate on the “unfit to be president” scale? Pretty damn high, actually.

• Clint Eastwood as Agent 007?

• “We Are the World” 25 years later, this time organized for Haiti relief. I confess that I don’t recognize all of the musicians involved in this new effort; nonetheless, with its tribute to Michael Jackson and its rap segment, it’s an impressive reworking of the original.

• Marvel Comics and Captain America have wimped out in a confrontation with the nutty and ill-informed right-wing “tea baggers,” as author Gary Phillips explains.

• And British author Neil Cross offers his “literary top 10.”