Taco Bell margaritas, Col. Sanders revival

"Taco Bell plans its first outlet in the world with alcoholic beverages," in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, reports Mark Kalinowski, fast-food analyst at Janney Capital Markets in Philadelphia.

Besides burritos, there'll be beer and frozen margarita-style drinks, based on tequila and other hard liquor. Perhaps an admission that Chicago's well-established Mexican-style restaurants are tough competition among a chile-literate (and thirsty) clientele. No word on when the Yum Brands chain that owns Taco Bell plans to take alkie national (or can afford a few hundred Pa. liquor licenses).

Elsewhere at Yum: "Colonel Sanders is back," Kalinowski tells us. He scanned YouTube and reports the dead founder's corporate reincarnation is Saturday Night Live comedian Darrell Hammond, in a white goatee and white suit and horn-rim-topped specs, telling lame jokes and pitching the product critics call "chicken-flavored doughnuts."

I once saw the real Colonel, stepping off a boat in Maine. Years later I interviewed that other folksy commodity pitchman, Orville Redenbacher, wearing the rose-colored glasses he began affecting after he made enough money to flee small-town Indiana for a condo on the Pacific. Redenbacher had been a USDA corn scientist, and that was cool; but he's as dead as the real Colonel these days, and I'm afraid margaritas at Taco Bell is a fresher story.