It’s Taco Bell Tuesday and I haven’t tried anything off the new Cantina Bell menu yet. My bad. I meant to, but I wound up eating way, way, way too much Mexican food twice this week at Mole, which is new to my neighborhood but not to the city. It’s a bit pricey, but it’s so good. They have Tortas there, so look out for that in a forthcoming Sandwich of the Week post, once I can pull myself away from the bacon, cheese and pork tacos.

For what it’s worth, and germane to this post, Mole also features “Tacos Americanos” — hard-shell tacos with ground beef, lettuce and cheese (and cilantro and onions, but ignore those for now because they don’t fit with this next point). Mexican food inspires Taco Bell, Taco Bell in turn inspires Mexican food. So we beat on.

Now for the latest in Mexican-inspired fast food news.

Reviewers prefer Cantina Menu to Chipotle: For my money, there’s no better fast-food writer in the country than Nancy Luna of the OC Register, whom I’ve mentioned here before. That’s partly because I don’t know of many other fast-food writers and mostly because she can review fast food without any of the smirking judgment that seems to riddle fast food reviews pretty much everywhere else. In her take on the new Cantina Menu, she compares the new Taco Bell burrito with Chipotle’s and writes: “If I had to choose between two white rice-stuffed burritos, I’d pick Taco Bell. For me, the key ingredient is the cilantro dressing, which adds a layer of creamy flavor that is lacking in a Chipotle burrito.”

So that’s promising. More inevitably to follow.

WSJ writer laments the misstatements of kids these days: For the Wall Street Journal, retired professor James Courtier claims that “so few [contemporary] students are readers” and as such their emails and papers are riddled with spelling errors. He provides a series of amusing examples, but notes that one student was not “astute enough to follow the lecture on ‘Taco Bell’s Canon’ in music-appreciation class.

I’m not sure how well-read James Courtier can claim to be if he’s not familiar with the Taco Bell Wiki that my friend Jake and I started a few years ago. If he were, he’d know that Taco Bell’s Canon in D is a real thing with a Taco Bell Wiki page. It’s great to hear they’re finally covering it in college music-appreciation classes*.

Delaware man commits the Taco Belliest crime: Charles Henry Crawford III passed out at the wheel in the drive-thru lane of the Taco Bell in Wilmington, Del. and veered into a curb. When the cops came to check it out, they found — shockingly — a mason jar full of marijuana in the passenger’s side floor and “other drug paraphernalia.”

Do not drive to Taco Bell in that condition. You endanger the lives of the sober Fourthmealers around you, plus then you have to go to jail with no tacos.

Video evidence of Taco Bell’s trip to Bethel, Alaska: If you read this feature, you certainly know about the Great Bethel Taco Bell Hoax and Taco Bell’s subsequent effort to rectify it with a truckload of tacos. And if you watched last night’s Home Run Derby, you probably saw the commercial featuring video of the Bethel Airlift. Here’s a short film Taco Bell produced about the episode:

*- It would be silly of me to get in the habit of bragging about my grades as an undergraduate because for the most part they were not outstanding. But I took a history of rock and roll class in which I scored a perfect 100 on every test and earned an A on every paper. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t take that class. There was a listening component on the final, and one of the songs was “Stairway to Heaven” and another was “All You Need is Love.” And there were actually students in the class groaning about how hard it was. Surreal. Maybe not everyone there was an aspiring rock god at the time, but c’mon. You just finished a history of rock and roll class and you can’t identify Stairway?