Police were called to check a suspicious woman in a van on the Taco Bell parking lot at 7237 Watson Rd. An Affton woman was arrested for having a methamphetamine laboratory inside her Ford van at 2:30 a.m. Felony drug distribution and manufacturing charges were issued by the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

– Andrew Dana Hudson, Affton-Shrewsbury Patch.

It’s like: Meth cooks, when will they learn? Have you never seen Breaking Bad? If you’re going to want Taco Bell in the wee hours of the morning — which is understandable regardless of your sobriety and vice of choice — you need to keep two distinct vehicles, one for making and distributing drugs, the other for acquiring Fourthmeal. You arouse enough suspicion just rolling into a Taco Bell parking lot at 2:30 a.m. Do it in an obvious meth lab and you’re headed for the big house.

If you only read one thing on the Internet today, let it be this exchange between Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi and Albertan Daniel Moore, with a cameo by the Taco Bell Twitter account.

UPDATE: The exchange has been outed as fake! And on the Internet, of all places. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

People always refer to “gilding the lily” as if it’s a bad thing. And look: Lilies are nice and all and I recognize that there’s not much demand to improve them. But only a fool wouldn’t trade a straight-up old school lily for a lily covered in solid gold. Gild that thing. That’s what I say.

– Me, here, Jan. 17, 2011.

Flowers are great and all, but I dismissed that Shakespeare-inspired idiom in a sandwich review last January with no particular inclination toward lilies. I actually had to Google-image them now just to determine what they look like.

They’re pretty and they probably smell nice, but they mean very little to me. So when I said “gild that thing,” I never considered the feelings of those who might hold lilies dear, who believe the lily perfect in its natural, un-gilded form. A more apt phrase that expresses the same cavalier and unnecessary excess but cuts nearer to my heart is this one: Doritoing the Taco.

I have never bit into a Taco Bell taco and thought, “You know? This could be saltier, more flavorful, nacho cheesier.” I’ve never really considered how or why it should be improved at all, save a packet or two of Fire Sauce. It is Glen Bell’s Mona Lisa, a towering fast-food masterpiece in a tiny package: The crunchiness of the shell, the tastiness of the beef, the cooling crispness of the lettuce, the creamy flourish of the cheese.

Just after midnight on March 8 at the Taco Bell near the Wal-Mart on Gatlin Boulevard in Port St. Lucie, cars snake around the drive-thru lane and into the half-full parking lot. There’s a shiny SUV with dark-tinted windows, a sportscar, a pickup truck and a crossover. There’s a banged-up compact full of oily looking locals crawled up from Florida’s gloriously seedy underbelly. Whether by design or by coincidence, they are just in time for the debut of Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco.

At the menu board, there’s no mention of the new product. But when I ask the disembodied voice from the speaker if they have them yet — as if I don’t know, as if I didn’t RSVP on the Facebook page and call ahead to make sure — the woman offers them in regular and Supreme versions. I order one of each and proceed to the nearest empty parking spot for my Fourthmeal.

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the shell of the regular Doritos Locos Taco seems a bit thicker than on the traditional Taco Bell taco, perhaps to emphasize its Dorito-ness. That’s good: It’s hearty and crunchy. The inside stuff is the same: lettuce, cheese and seasoned beef, all predictably delicious.

But the powdery Dorito stuff on the outside upsets the delicate taco balance a little bit, and dries up the tongue before it even reaches the inside parts of the taco. And there’s no clear evidence of synergy here: It tastes like a Taco Bell taco inside a Dorito, so it’s still great, no doubt. But I can’t comfortably say the pairing clearly benefits either component.

The Supreme version is better. The tanginess and creaminess of the sour cream both complements the flavor of the Dorito stuff and mitigates its dryness. Add some Hot Sauce on there and it’s pretty damn delicious. Better than a Volcano Taco, though? A Crunchwrap Supreme? A Cheesy Gordita Crunch? Hardly.

This might disappoint some of you to read, I understand, but if I were to simply provide fawning coverage of every single step Taco Bell takes, it would trivialize everything I write about Taco Bell. We need to call this what it is: A clever marketing gimmick aimed to hype up the brand — which is working, if the midnight lines in Port St. Lucie are any indication — but more of a novelty item than the paradigm-shifting Taco Bell innovation I hoped for.

I suspect with some experimentation the Doritos Locos Taco shell might prove a valuable Taco Bell ingredient in other incarnations: A Cheesy Doritos Gordita Crunch would probably be amazing, for example. But on its own, it seems like living a little too mas even for me.

To Dorito the Taco, “to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

Sometimes you just gotta kick up some dirt; make some waves; blaze some trails; burn up the night; be the first one to head out; and the last one to turn in; try what you’ve never tried before; make a play, and let it ride; because if you never do, you’ll never know. Sometimes you just gotta Live Más.

– Taco Bell.

It’s true: If you never cover a taco shell in Doritos stuff, you’ll just never know. LIVE F#@$ING MAS!

I’m going to shout that every time I do something stupid from here on out for the rest of my life. Just so you know. If someone streaks past you yelling, “Live más,” it’s probably me or someone else awesome.

Via Mike.

Hat tip to the seven people who put me on to this one: The official rollout date for Taco Bell’s groundbreaking Doritos Locos Tacos is March 8. They’ll be available just after midnight for Fourthmeal.

So if anyone wants to join me at 12:01 a.m. on March 8, I’ll most likely be at either the Taco Bell location on Gatlin Boulevard or the one on St. Lucie West Boulevard in Port St. Lucie. I doubt I’ll drive all the way to the one on US-1 or to the Taco Bells in nearby Jensen Beach or Fort Pierce unless it turns out either is, for some reason, the only participating location in the area.

Florida is a magical place.

Also, in related and similarly amazing news, Taco Bell plans to unveil a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco sometime after the initial launch. And everyone knows Cool Ranch Doritos are way better than Nacho Cheese. No word yet on how that will translate to taco stuff.

OMG YOU GUYS IT’S REALLY HAPPENING!

There’s a Facebook movement (that I had nothing to do with) to bring back the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito to Taco Bell. Please Like this page and tell all your friends about it, and have them tell their friends and tell their friends to tell their friends, but not to tell their friends to tell their friends to tell their friends because c’mon already.

It would be sweet if the Internet picked this up as a thing. It’s a Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito, and if I had eaten one within the past 10 years maybe I could tell you in more explicit terms why you should be demanding Taco Bell bring it back. But the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito is at this point a mere whisper in the brilliant symphony of Taco Bell Stuff I’ve Eaten, something I might be able to identify with great focus but not something I can readily distinguish amid the thunderous rolls of the MexiMelt tympani and the bawdy glissando of the Gordita trombones.