IMG_8330, originally uploaded by meanlouise.

We’d just finished our corndogs at the opening night party at SxSW when we were stopped in our tracks by this lovely lady in her stylin’ Team Meat sweatshirt. We just had to meet her. Turns out, she was Jo Walston, singer for Austin bluegrass legends, The Meat Purveyors. She was kind enough to let us take her photo. Go check out the band, they’re really great.

Four Corndogs Of Freedom, St. Louis City Museum, originally uploaded by TFDuesing.

Recently, Eric and I attended sxsw in Austin, Texas. We were at the opening night party when I decided I wanted a corndog. I don’t know why they were serving us hotdogs, brats and corndogs at the Mexican American Cultural Center - I’m guessing they figured the open bar and free-flowing vodka would keep us from asking too many questions.

To be fair, they were excellent corndogs.

This was the moment when I made one of those amazing discoveries about my life partner, who I thought I knew so well: he’d never eaten a corndog. I know, right? It’s crazy! After a little bit of grumbling, he gave in and procured us a couple of corndogs.

So - the next day we were hanging out between panels at the conference, bickering about the origins of the corndog and staging skirmishes between Captain Corndog and Baron Von Broccoli.

That was a lie. We didn’t do any such thing, but we wished we could have. In lieu of epic food-related action figure battles, we instead did some research on the history of batter-dipped processed meat products on sticks.

FoodReference.com notes that “Corn dogs are an excellent source of calories, fat, cholesterol and salt.”

Not surprisingly, the origins of the corndog are disputed. According to Wikipedia there are claims regarding the origins of the first corndog from all over the United States, most prominently from Minnesota, Texas, California, and Illinois.

The Cozy Dog Drive In in Chicago not only stakes a claim to being the birthplace of the corndog, it was featured in an Illinois Bureau of Tourism campaign that included prominent placement of this poster, which is surreal even by our standards, in bus-stops and other public areas around the city in 2007:

Incidentally, corndogs.org is a Mike Watt appreciation page. It has nothing to do with corndogs.

The most important thing we learned was that the third Saturday in March is National Corndog Day.

So, what is National Corndog Day? According to the website, this is the 18th annual NCD.

For those of you who may be first timers at this grand event, let us describe it as the happiest day of basketball and meats on sticks that you’ll ever have. National Corndog Day coincides with the Saturday of the final 32 teams in NCAA basketball tournament (this year it’s March 21). This Saturday is the only day all year that one can watch a quadruple-header of college basketball games from start to finish without having to change the channel. Therefore, to celebrate the excitement of the college basketball tournament, and have fun with friends, we eat Corndogs! Lots of Corndogs…

Frankly, I’m more interested in the tater tots, but that’s just me.

There are vegan and vegetarian corn dogs, but seeing as this is the meatblog and seeing as I’ve already spent way more time reading about corndogs today than I ever imagined possible, I’m going to avoid that digression.

You can try making your own corndogs (with or without meat) with recipes supplied by Alton Brown or the Hillbilly Housewife but it seems safer to just pick up some Foster Farms corndogs (official sponsors of National Corndog Day), especially if you’re planning to consume a lot of PBR (also official sponsors of National Corndog Day).

We located 7 parties in DC, 5 in Maryland, and 11 in Virginia. Note that this is a user-generated database of all NCD-related celebrations and some of the events listed are private parties.

This is our favorite public event: Feral Lords of V Street (Motorcycle Gang) Do Up National Corndog Day.

If you happen to be in the vicinity of 1329 V Street NW today, stop by for a corndog and give the Feral Lords our best, won’t you?

Spotted on the sxsw schedule: the BBQ Crash Course at Emo’s - sponsored by dishola. (We’ll be there!)

The second annual Austin Regional Grilled Cheese Invitational is tonight. We have parties to attend, but we couldn’t resist posting about this intriguing sounding event.

Members of the Grilled Cheese Society will need to pay $5 per person for the Society dues, but each grilling team gets 3 free memberships.

The highest scoring sammich will win a free plane ticket to compete in the National GCI on April 25th in Los Angeles.

I can’t wait to read more. Their website asks, “Can you grill like a butterfly and sting like a bee?” which is hilarious (to me, anyway).