Did you know that there are all kinds of non-Palin things occur in Alaska? It's true.

Take, for example, Senator Ted Stevens' corruption case…

A wealthy oil pipeline contractor testified Wednesday that he didn't charge Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens for renovating his home because he was told that Stevens' requests for invoices were just a ruse.

The star witness, a contractor and former Stevens buddy Bill Allen, suggested under oath that Stevens gave him two very different sets of instructions of whether or not he should bill the Senator for the $250,000 worth of housing renovations that the Senator did not disclose as a gift.

The housing project turned a small cabin into a two-story home that included a wraparound porch, a wine cellar, a garage, and a sauna. Stevens claimed he didn't really pay attention to the renovation since it was his wife's idea. And the former head of the Appropriations Committee shouldn't realistically be expected to know how much stuff costs anyway.

Also, he probably assumed that the project costs were gonna be low since a sauna is really just a series of tubes.

Introduced into the prosecution's evidence was a note, which Allen was told later to ignore, from Stevens in which he asked for a bill…

"Thanks for all your work on the chalet. You owe me a bill," the note read. "Remember Torricielli, my friend. Friendship is one thing, compliance with the ethics rules, entirely different."

Whether he was seriously requesting a bill hinges on whether he was talking about Robert Torricelli, a former Democratic representative from New Jersey who resigned after an ethics scandal, or Evangelista Torricelli, the seventeenth century Italian scientist (and Stevens pal) who invented the barometer.