The Pinnacle Of Human Achievement #48: Wax Paper.

This might seem a bit outta left field, but stick with me here.

We were talking about hot dogs at the office—we talk about hot dogs a lot, come to think of it. And we got to talking about what makes a good hot dog really, really good.

Personally, I like boiled ones better than grilled ones, for starters. And I absolutely HATE ketchup on anything (is that un-American?).

I'm convinced that the key to the whole hot dog deal is wax paper. You go to the hot dog place, they drop your hot dog in a sheet of wax paper and wrap it up (an artful, truly amazing thing to watch through the window at Raleigh's Char Grill). The hot dog sits in there all snuggly and the bun gets steamed by the moisture coming off the hot dog and the chili and stuff. And it all just sorta sits there and comingles, for lack of a better word.

So, rather than a number of separate flavors--like bun, dog, chili and mustard--you get just ONE thing: chili dog. All the flavors are fused somehow through the wax paper's startling superpowers.

My wife was saying this morning that the same thing applies to hamburgers. And she's right. Get you a cheeseburger from the Burger Boy in Wilson and you'll see what I mean-—it all becomes one flavor unit. This is why the hamburgers in fancier restaurants aren't as good—-they bring 'em to you in pieces, so the flavors haven't had a chance to sneak around and get all comfortable with each other.

Some places try the same trick with tin foil. And while that works OK, there's something about the sneak peak you get through the wax paper-—the smeared/squashed chili, for instance-—that does it for me. The Billiard Academy in my hometown, Thomasville, GA, always gives you a visible chili stripe beneath the first layer of wax paper. (By the way, the Billiard Academy might have the best hot dogs in the world.)

The point of all this is that we should all stop for a minute and realize how much better our hot dogs, and therefore our very lives, are because of wax paper.