Taco Bandido and the Dead Zone

AM band radio conditions have not been wonderful lately and I have nothing to add to the log.

Listening to 1400 kc on the way to work this morning, there were a handful of stations in the mud without not much intelligence except for an advertisement for a restaurant called "Taco Bandido" or "Taco Bandito." No location was announced and looking up the restaurant on the Internet was not much help because there were more than one with the same name. The nearest Taco Bandido is in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which jives with WICK on 1400  and would have been a new logging, but that is not good enough for a logging.

I noticed something odd while driving to work. My commute takes me through Meriden, Connecticut, via I-691 and I noticed that if my radio is tuned in the neighborhood of 1400 kc as it was this morning, the receiver becomes dead quiet as I approach the downtown Meriden exits and continues to be dead for over a mile as I pass through the downtown area. In this dead zone, I do not hear any signals and I wonder if I am actually hearing a strong unmodulated carrier that is blocking out everything else in that area.