  We describe a relation between Arnold's strange duality and a polar duality
between the Newton polytopes which is mostly due to M.~Kobayashi. We show that
this relation continues to hold for the extension of Arnold's strange duality
found by C.~T.~C.~Wall and the author. By a method of Ehlers-Varchenko, the
characteristic polynomial of the monodromy of a hypersurface singularity can be
computed from the Newton diagram. We generalize this method to the isolated
complete intersection singularities embraced in the extended duality. We use
this to explain the duality of characteristic polynomials of the monodromy
discovered by K.~Saito for Arnold's original strange duality and extended by
the author to the other cases.
