Glen Bell, Founder of Taco Bell

Turned Negra Modeado January 16, 2010

Glen Bell, founder of Taco Bell, has dropped his last chalupa.

Apparently his heart, stuffed with a delicious blend of three cheeses, refused to pump another ounce of that zesty red sauce.

Bell opened his first Taco Bell in 1962 using nothing more than some second-hand e coli and absolutely no concept of what real Mexican food tastes like.

In 2007, Taco Bell made headlines after video cameras showed one of their restaurants getting overrun by rats. In its defense, the company said the rats were just trying to get out.

Bell requested his remains be wrapped in a warm tortilla, stuffed with hearty beans, and grilled to perfection.

From The Archives: Gerry Thomas, Inventor of the TV Dinner

Morning Remembrance Portraits by Nathan Smith copyright 2011


Stick a Fork in Him, He Was Done July 18, 2005

Gerry Thomas, the man who perfected the concept of putting dangerous amounts of fat, sodium and MSG into aluminum trays and freezing them so a generation of children could grow up insane in front of the television, died last month after finally tasting a Swanson Hungry Man dinner.

Witnesses say when doctors reached him, Thomas was warm on the outside, but still frozen solid in the middle.

Thomas’s original aluminum TV Dinner tray can now be seen in the Smithsonian Institution next to a diorama of the first domestic beating it caused.

In 1999 Thomas was honored for his invention when he was asked to press his hands and TV tray into the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Paramedics had to be called when Thomas mistook the lukewarm, half-congealed mixture for a pile of Swanson’s Potatoes & Beef Gravy.

The deceased requested his remains be crammed into a metal tray with the foil pealed back, and each organ sealed in a separate compartment to avoid mixing the liver gravy with his brain noodles.