Painter Kenneth Noland has died. Apart from any personal reactions, may I make a commercial observation? Which is that the people hurting in the stock market crash last year, who pulled some good old Nolands out of their Long Island dens to make some quick five-figure cash, are all face-palming super hard right now.

The New Jersey State Senate will vote on gay marriage before the lame duck session of the legislature expires. Senate President Dick Codey will put the bill up for debate this Thursday. Should it pass, the Assembly would then take a crack at it. But, uh, don’t get your hopes up. It ain’t happening. Sigh.

A pretty fabulous drawing that won’t be appearing on the cover of the New York Observer tomorrow.

Expert: “Tilda Swinton gave the best performance by an actress in 2009.”

Sir Christopher Lee’s symphonic metal concept album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross is pretty clearly gonna be something special.

Expert: “Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.”

Every year, I ask myself: am I going to read anything that is made-up this year? For 2010, I am not so sure. The invented seems so unrewarding. Still! Here is a preview of the first half of the year in mostly-fiction. Can you believe people have the gall to turn blogs into books? Like that crazy kid José de Sousa Saramago, the author of Blindness? Sheesh, some nerve.

I am merely going to note the volume at which I exclaimed “Oh my GOD” while reading this Onion interview with Dave Eggers, regarding his publication, the San Francisco Panorama. (Earlier, we published some speculation and suppositions regarding that one-time paper’s own business model-by the way, since then, we’ve heard that many people who worked on it were not paid at all.)

• To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. * [Um, also, ads.]

• We’ve lost that very simple transaction that’s so pure, where a reader can say, “I support what you’re doing, here’s my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here’s my 50-cent contribution each day. ** [Nostalgia renders the past unrecognizable.]

• Instead of running a wire story about Afghanistan, we knew a guy going to Afghanistan, J. Malcolm Garcia, and we said, “Okay, send us something when you’re done.” And he sent us something, and it doesn’t even cost that much, because he was going anyway. ******** [Screams]

• I think there’s great value to the Associated Press and to Reuters, too, but if you wanted to generate original content, maybe written by local writers, it just takes a little bit of openness to open your pages up to a wider freelance writer pool, and then you might find new voices and a wider array of voices, and definitely more original content that can’t be found anywhere else. All that wire stuff, that’s free, and I don’t think you’re gonna put that genie back in the bottle. ** [??? Actually the AP does this thing where they charge people to run their stories?]

• My respect for everyone that works at every daily, especially those that send it off at night, is just through the roof, because if they have four or five errors a day, it’s pretty remarkable, given how many moving parts there are. [This is a very good point and nicely made!]

• The paper-based media really has to work within a rational scale, and if they do, they’ll be fine. There’s plenty of room, people really care, there are magazines that people will fight to hold onto. You might not be able to operate your own LearJet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist. [A totally excellent point, very well put!]

“Marine biologists from the National Taiwan Ocean University discovered a new species of crab off the southern Taiwanese coast. With a bright red shell covered with small white spots, the crab resembles a large strawberry.” Unfortunately, the two crabs captured by scientists died in captivity shortly after, leading the biologists to discover that they tasted considerably less fragariant than they appeared.

Here’s how one should best be remembered, by Awl pal and designer pk: “Brad”-the longtime blogger, theater enthusiast, coiner of the unfortunate phrase “blogosphere,” serial raconteur and total hound who died yesterday-”did everything gay men are told we should no longer do in this day and age. He drank far too much, he loved to smoke, and he had a taste for distractingly handsome, alarmingly young men. In fact, Su and I once referred to a boyfriend whose name we had forgotten as ‘this many.’ The name stuck, and Brad would tell us for months how ‘this many’ was doing. Brad’s last trip to Chicago left us in some disgusting bar at four in the morning-our fifth for the night-commandeering the jukebox, and Brad howling along to Prince’s “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” Word. (Photo by.)