This is just so wrong, in so many ways: fourthmeal.com

I was down in the south Bay today, making sure the parental abode in East San Jose would survive the expected frigid temperatures. We'd basically shut down the heat after my mom moved on to save $$$, but his nibs was afraid the pipes would burst if the temps dropped as low as expected.

(Woo hoo! Temps in the 20s expected. We haven't had temps this low since The Great Freeze of 1989. Yesterday, in anticipation, we moved the jade plants and herbs into the house. Did you know the blossoms on jade plants had a pungent smell? I didn't. Now I do.)

The younger sib was taking the train in to work and wouldn't have a car available to check on the parental abode and rather than ask him to change his plans, I drove down, set the heat, pumped a bit from the pool cover, piled things in piles, shifted nine bags of clothes/towels/sheets/&c. to the Goodwill and ... had lunch with his nibs.

Lunch was our usual (if not Thai Orchid) place: Taco Bell. Fears of green onion? chopped lettuce? E.coli? Death? Not us. Death by Chalupa, maybe.

Call me totally unaware. We don't watch TV, so we don't get the commercials. We don't pay much attention to print ads.

Today at Taco Bell, I was introduced to the ad theme of "the fourth meal. ... the meal between dinner and breakfast."

You know that meal ... the meal that makes 127 million Americans overweight, and 60 million obese. (*)

There's even a very lame Web site -- very lame I say because I tried it because I wanted to see what was being offered, and ...why? Why have this site at all? I exited about three clicks into the experience.

The thing that bothers me most about all this is the Taco Bell ad agency thinking it would be a great idea to convince folks who eat at Taco Bell that a fourth meal between dinner and breakfast is not an aberration and "munchies" (uh.oh.) but an 'onest-to-gosh extra meal in the day that everyone knows about and eats and you should too.

Bad enough I eat chalupas at lunch: ghod spare me from the day when I think a mid-evening "meal" of chalupas is nothing out of the ordinary, nothing I ought to be having second thoughts about.

fourthmeal?

That copy writer ought to have zir mouth washed out with soap.

Whoever designed the Web site needs a spanking, too.