InstaPundit quotes an AP story claiming that the cost of a package of hot dogs is up almost 7% in the last year to $4.29. I paid 99¢ each for my last two packs, on sale at Food Lion. Hot dogs keep for months in the refrigerator and years in the freezer, so there’s no reason ever to pay full price. What brand did I buy, and what kind of animal(s) were they made from? Who cares? Anyone who worries about the precise ingredients of his food shouldn’t be eating hot dogs in the first place. Even the priciest dog is, as Mencken put it, “a cartridge filled with the sweepings of the abattoir”. And even the cheapest dog tastes OK when broiled until semi-crispy.

As for buns, I put my hot dogs on semi-toasted folded white bread, with plenty of ketchup, mustard, and minced fresh onion. Even the traditional short stubby hot dogs stick out of the pseudo-bun on both ends as they ought to, and the bread holds the condiments at least as well as a bun, whose hinges tend to break under the strain of a well-slathered dog. Of course, bread is also generally cheaper than dedicated hot dog buns, and works well for hamburgers, too, especially if they’re square.

On Winds of Change, Donald Sensing has a post entitled ‘Buy a Honda, Kill a Polar Bear’. If I do, can I have the skin for my living-room floor? Because that would make buying a Honda that much more attractive.

Notes from my reading of Book II:

1. Again the passage that most struck me was a classicizing bit, a simile describing Satan’s journey through Chaos (943-50):

As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness
With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale,
Persues the Arimaspian, who by stelth
Had from his wakeful custody purloind
The guarded Gold: So eagerly the Fiend
Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet persues his way,
And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes:

This has some resemblance rhetorically to 7.501-3, though the latter is more neatly laid out in threes:

                    Earth in her rich attire
Consummat lovly smil’d; Aire, Water, Earth,
By Fowl, Fish, Beast, was flown, was swum, was walkt
Frequent;

Milton does not mention that the Arimaspians were traditionally one-eyed: did he not think it important, or assume that his readers already knew? ‘Moarie’ is not in the Shorter O.E.D. or www.dictionary.com, and must be a form of ‘moory’, meaning ‘marshy, fenny’.

2. The account of the origins of Sin and Death, featuring rape, incest, head-birth, and bestial transmogrification, manages to outdo Hesiod in gruesomeness.

3. It’s interesting that the music of the fallen angels (546-51) is epic or panegyric, sung “With notes Angelical to many a harp” about themselves and their deeds. The effect is rather Homeric.