Taco Bell offer to feed bands

It's wrong, it's very wrong. But it's so very, very good. Taco Bell are offering bands free taco bell foods as part of their regular Feed The Beat promotion.

Five hundred dollars worth of Taco Bell bucks (or money-off coupons, in other words), which works out at about 600 cheese roll-ups. Enough to keep a drummer happy.

And, don't worry, bands: they've cleaned up the kitchens:

50 Cent is humourless

Taco Bell ran some ads recently for their cheap menu, suggesting 50 Cent call himself 99 Cents or 89 Cents or some such, reflecting their cheap prices. Not, perhaps, the funniest advert ever, but mildly amusing.

50 Cent was unamused:

The rapper is accusing the chain of "diluting the value of his good name".

Yes. He's launched a lawsuit which, we hope, if he wins will see him being paid in small sachets of sauce and unlimited pop refills. Given he named himself after some loose change, surely if anyone is upset at 50 Cents being ridiculed, it should be the US mint, shouldn't it?

Darkness at 3AM: Beckham picks at her taco

The 3AM Girls have, like Gordon, got to have a chat with Victoria Beckham - they seem to think theirs is somehow exclusive, presumably in the sense that nobody else actually was talking to her at that precise moment.

Victoria, sadly, has been reduced to name-dropping:

"I was like, fuck that's Julia Roberts!

"Incredibly, she knew who David and I were and we got on really well. She's very down-to earth. We're both mums with young children, so we had a lot to talk about. We've swapped numbers and I'm looking forward to catching up with her again.

"Most of my friends in LA, like Katie Holmes and Kate Beckinsale, all have children so we get together and do very normal things.

How incredible that the shy, retiring Victoria Beckham would have come to Julia Roberts' attention. Just fancy.

But don't get carried away that Beckham spends all her time going through OK! Magazines, playing a kind of Bingo where she ticks off the people she's met. Oh, no:

"It's not just celebrities I hang out with though. I've become really good friends with the mums from my sons' school as well."

She often waves at them, we'd imagine.

The talk then turns to vaginas, after she went to a Mexican restaurant:

"It was called Pink Taco. My friends told me after we'd been that it translates to pink vagina, which is not ideal."

Up to a point, Victoria - taco has become a slang term for vagina, but it's a bit like going to Super Sausage and coming away saying "but that translates to massive cock". If Beckham thinks that Taco is Spanish for vagina, what does she think when she sees a sign for Taco Bell? Does she think it's a place offering extreme body modification?

For whom the Taco Bell tolls

Not so long back, Taco Bell was struggling with reports of rats running riot in the kitchens and a problem with food poisoning being added with the lettuce. Now, they've got a new sort of problem to cope with: Girl Talk went do a gig there using vouchers they'd won in an earlier Taco Bell competition, sharing $500 worth of Taco Bell stuff with the audience. That's a lot of tacos.

Taco Bell food is safe to eat

Taco Bell's plans for expansion don't apparently, extended to repeating their ill-fated British experiment. Instead, they're throwing their advertising money behind pushing Emo bands.

Because nothing says "I hate myself and I wanna die, or at least have people think I do", like a sloppy bean burrito and a cup of Coke.

She does a PA just like a ringin' a Bell

Fergie turned up to do a PA in the Hamptons this weekend just gone, but seemed to get a bit confused. TMZ reports:

TMZ was at the club on Sunday for The Juicy and Glamorous Party, where Ms. Stacy Ferguson took a hosting gig for the night, singing along to a couple lines of "Glamorous" and "Fergalicious" -- in-between random rants about her favorite fast food restaurant.

That would be Taco Bell, of course. It's not so odd, though - for Fergie, "still going to Taco Bell" is her "Jenny from the block"; she claims in the lyric to her collaboration with Ludacris, Glamorous, that she still goes to Taco Bell, sometimes with her hair all mussed up:

I be on the movie screens
Magazines and boogie scenes
I'm not clean, I'm not pristine
I'm no queen, I'm no machine
I still go to Taco Bell
Drivethrough, raw as Hell
I don't care, I'm still real
No matter how many records I sell

Although, of course, if she was that bloody real, she'd be getting her tacos from the Taco Bell express in Target, wouldn't she?
News that Fergie has been extolling the virtues of Taco Bell has led to Yum Brands taking a panicky advert to reassure customers.

Oh, alright, that's from last December when the lettuce in Taco Bell had been poisoning people in the US and the company tried to restore confidence with a series of ads on TV and in the New York Times. Is it just us, or does nothing drain confidence more than a company saying "our product won't poison you... any more... trust us..."