By now I'm sure you've heard that Out of Town News, the iconic newsstand at the heart of Harvard Square is the latest casualty of the mallification of the area.  The fact that its original owners sold it years ago and it's been chain-owned and operated for the last decade and a half may ease the hurt a little.  And buck up!  KFC/Taco Bell have expressed an interest in the property! 

The restaurant chain could lend some much-needed permanence to the ever-changing square, and put something truly useful back at this crossroads of the commerce and culture in Cambridge.  I mean, print media is so last millennium, but who doesn't like fried chicken and tacos — UNDER ONE ROOF!  It's practically recession-proof!

And at a time when the upscaling of the square threatens the very existence of the drug-addled rabble of runaway skateboarders, free-range schizophrenics, and old-school beggars in the famed Pit, the value meal will usher in a veritable Renaissance!  "Chalupa Meals for the Masses!" could be the rallying cry of the New Revolution!

Yes, there will be the detractors — self-proclaimed traditionalists with snobby pretensions who see the stand as a "symbol" of the "intellectual vitality" of the "square," but have never bought anything there. 

Sheraton Lithwick, a Cambridge resident and a regular passerby of the newsstand almost shed a tear when told of its imminent demise.  "Someone should come along and preserve it for those of us who like walking past it and seeing it as a symbol of the faux quirky cosmopolitanism of the area."

"I hate magazines and newspapers," Tatiana Truthworth told me.  "they're all lies!  But I love dolls!  And this was the one place I could come and thumb through Haute Doll magazine."

"Can't Obama do something about this?" cried Sarah Pagett, one forlorn undergrad I spoke to. 

But Jake Talcott, her boyfriend, a business student, summed it up with a shrug.  "Fact is, you can't get chalupas on your iphone.  Yet.  And, face it, fried chicken tastes better than newsprint."