Notepad

Liechtenstein is the world's largest exporter of false teeth.

That's my new favorite fact. I've been having trouble figuring out how to ease it into conversation.

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"Stoned odyssey brings probation": the Delaware student who took a two-day, mushroom-induced pilgrimage to Connecticut driving other people's cars, has his day in court.

After explaining to the judge that Pemulis put DMZ on his toothbrush, or maybe it was "something I ate," the guy got two years of probation.

At The New Yorker, they wouldn't have allowed that headline. The word "odyssey" is only permitted in that publication to refer to a journey which ends again where it began, back home with Penelope and the dog.

The AP Stylebook is less pretentious, and allows the word to be used for "any extended wandering or journey."

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News you can use: How to get out red wine stains.

Can anybody vouch for this?

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Here's Wyatt Mason in the August Harper's, discussing Frank Miller at the end of his review essay "Flying Up and Flying Down: The rise and fall of the American superhero." It's nice to see Miller getting some high-brow props:

For 25 years, he has been drawing and writing the best superhero comics in the medium. His run on the comic Daredevil for three years beginning when he was 22 is the finest in that hero's 40-year life. His 450-page, two-volume Batman saga, Dark Knight, is satire, tragedy, romance and utopian treatise. His stories, most recently Sin City, are informed by the police procedural, and yet transcend their form. They are funny, without being flimsy.

His heroes do not "look real," but they feel human and, not infrequently, horribly inhumane. They are falling apart physically, are borderline psychotic, their psychoses produced by a commitment to morality in immoral times.

Miller is looking beyond the borders of the world of comics and is not reassured by what he sees. Nor is he trying to reassure us. His stories are not suitable for children. They entertain, illuminate, discomfort. They are comic books, in the best sense of the words. They are alive.

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Did you realize that Mark Dayton, D-Minn., is the most liberal senator?

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The George W. Bush Soundboard is quite fun. It's like the audio equivalent of refrigerator-magnet poetry. And the explosive way he says "Putin" just makes me laugh.

After playing with that a while, watch the Will Ferrell campaign ad. He doesn't really sound like Bush, but he talks exactly like him.

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The big news here in everyone's home town is the Trader Joe's that just opened in the renovated armory building on State Street. Here's hoping it doesn't hurt sales too much for the Selene Co-op up the street.