Taco Bell? Pachelbel?

I stole this post from Matt Baldwin, the defective yeti. I could have just linked to it, but there's no fun in that. His site gets plenty of views already.

September 19, 2006

Research Day: Taco Bell And The Ozone Layer

Why is Taco Bell so named?: When I was nine or ten, I was in the car with my dad when we passed one of the Taco Bells that were springing up all over our suburb. "Why do they call it that?" I asked.

My father, a classical music aficionado, thought for a moment and said "I think it's a play on the name Pachelbel. You know, the composer who wrote the Canon? And the Hexachordum Apollinis?"

That answer satisfied me for a decade and a half. Recently, though, while driving by another of the ubiquitous fast-food outlets, the question popped back into my head, and it occurred to me that a restaurant boasting a "Cheesy Gordita Crunch Supreme" for 99¢ was probably not named in honor of a seventeenth century Baroque organist. Maybe if they served a "Beef Taccota in C minor," or their soda machine dispensed "Mountain Fugue."

So today I headed over to tacobell.com, and pored over their "history" page, looking for clues as to the store's name. And by "pored over," I mean I read the first two words in their history, which were as follows:

"Glen Bell ..."

Ah. The founder's name is Bell. Duh.

And so my fifteen-year investigation comes to a sudden and anti-climatic end. Wow. Honestly, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life.