How do I remove apps from the "open with" menu in Mountain Lion?

If I right-click a document in Finder, I get a contextual menu offering all of the potential applications with which I might open that document.  My problem is that some of those applications are no longer operational and I want them to be removed from the menu.  How can I do that?

I'm not sure how the order is determined. Clearly, the first level sort is ascending by application name these days (since Lion, I think), but it seems to be random after that. It's not by version, though that would be convenient.
Also, I notice that on my relatively clean Mountain Lion system I sometimes get duplicate entries in the "open with" list that cannot be explained by duplicate copies of the application. On a text file, I get two each of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Equation Editor, Evernote, and Xcode; none of these is duplicated on this system. I get only one entry each for the Notepad stub application, a few Adobe apps, TextWrangler, Safari, Numbers, Pages, and several others.
Where there are duplicated entries, it doesn't seem to matter which one I select; I get the same instance of the program no matter which I select. I take this to mean that one is an alias for the other.
That's my mystery and not necessarily yours. Are your "unhelpful but working stub applications" also duplicates?

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