Meanwhile, in Texas<\/a> column is Texas Monthly fact checker Meher Yeda, and she joins TM Out Loud host Katy Vine this week to share a few of her favorite stories of the year.<\/p>\nThis piece was produced by Sara Kinney, Patrick Michels, and Brian Standefer.<\/p>\n
Transcript
\nTranscript<\/p>\n
Katy Vine (voice-over): Hi, and welcome to TM Out Loud, exclusive audio storytelling for Texas Monthly Audio subscribers. I\u2019m Katy Vine.<\/p>\n
Texas is, of course, one of the most consequential places on earth. It has one of the world\u2019s largest economies, it\u2019s a global center in the energy industry. It\u2019s home to the wealthiest man on earth. The first time somebody walked on the moon, his first words were to mission control\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0in Texas.<\/p>\n
Every month, my Texas Monthly colleagues and I devote most of our magazine to explaining\u2014in one way or another\u2014why our home state is so exceptionally important.<\/p>\n
But we also save one page each month for something else: A brief survey of the strangest, most trivial, and confounding things that you might have missed underneath that more consequential news.<\/p>\n
We call the feature Meanwhile, in Texas, and the writer who compiles these oddities each month is my colleague, Meher Yeda.<\/p>\n
This week on TM Out Loud, Meher is here to talk about the most memorable inconsequential tidbits she surfaced this year.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s my conversation with Meher Yeda.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Hey, Meher. Thanks for coming on the show.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Hi, Katy.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: You\u2019ve been working on a segment called Meanwhile in Texas for the magazine, featuring all kinds of wacky headlines and events from around the state\u2014everything from a cryptocurrency named after a baby capybara to a pickup carrying 26 couches at once.<\/p>\n
The first Meanwhile column ran in January 2014. You then took over the section for the May 2024 issue. Can you talk about how you first got involved with the column and how you choose headlines?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah. I just took over for the person that had been doing it prior, Arman. He was leaving, and so they were looking for someone to do it, and they just kind of offered it to me. And I was like, \u201cYeah,\u201d \u2019cause it seemed so fun and a way to keep up to date with Texas news and funky headlines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whenever I\u2019m looking at the news, I keep a running document each month of headlines. And obviously, people send me stuff, and people send me things from social media or in their own lives. And at the end of the month, I\u2019ll look at all sorts of news sites. And, any kind of law- and crime-related websites, particularly, because they tend to capture, I think, a lot of events that, once you really look into them, are actually more absurd than they seem on the surface.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Like what? What\u2019s one that comes off the top of your head?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: I do want to make sure that it\u2019s not all fluffy animal stories. So I like\u2014<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: \u2019Cause you could probably fill one with that.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: With just animal stories. I think that there is merit to having a thing now and then. Like, I think, last issue, actually, just about a brawl at a Bass Pro Shops.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Oh, I love that one. Oh man. Can you talk about it? Just for people who missed this epic moment in Odessa history.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: There was a Bass Pro Shops opening in Odessa, and there was a man waiting for the bathroom. And I believe he just\u2014he got agitated that another person was taking too long. So the guy came out of the bathroom, and they exchanged a few words and then ended up getting into an entire fight that got more people in and might\u2019ve drawn some blood.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: It was videotaped by everybody watching, spread around, became this sort of viral moment in Odessa history. For better or worse. What are some other favorites of yours that you\u2019ve come across?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: So I said not all animal stories, but I love the animal stories. There was a really cute one about a pig and a blind dog who were seen walking along the highway. And it was kind of unclear whether or not they were lost. But then they ended up like\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: They were just on an adventure.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: They were just on an adventure. And they were walking along the highway, and then they went into a general store. And then they were reunited with their owner after, but they kept each other safe. And I love that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: So are there parts of the state that are really rich for territory? Like, for a little while, I know we had something called Meanwhile, in Lufkin. So it\u2019s like, for a while at least, Lufkin was a gold mine for finding just kind of funny little stories. And sometimes that has to do with just whatever news outlet, or the personalities in charge of those kind of outlets in a particular area. But is there anything that you\u2019re finding right now that\u2019s really good, productive areas?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: I think Houston. Houston has been such a gold mine these past few months. Maybe it\u2019s because they also just have the Houston suburbs and more reporters dedicated. I do think East Texas has the occasional weird, silly story. You know how there\u2019s \u201cFlorida man\u201d? I think there should be an \u201cEast Texas man\u201d out there. But I would say a lot comes from Houston.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Yeah, that makes sense.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: So many that I\u2014we actually have our own style rules for Meanwhile, and we don\u2019t like to repeat places. And sometimes I have to break that because I have two really good Houston items in a month.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Were there some segments that didn\u2019t make final cut of the column? Is there reasons that something would get cut?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: One reason that they can be cut is simply, you cannot summarize this in one sentence. That\u2019s kind of hard to take a very complex person and situation and finagle that into one full sentence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We had an item about a girl who, she was part of this really weird online AI-scam thingy that happened. So basically, there was a viral news story\u2014news in quotes\u2014about a waitress from Olive Garden who threw breadsticks at the customers. And this was Facebook viral. And this girl from College Station was being used as the picture in the fake story. And it turned out that she had been arrested, and someone else pulled her mug shot into this fake story. So for many reasons it didn\u2019t work out\u2014as soon as we knew that there was the second layer, it became hard to make one sentence of, \u201cWell, you know, this woman got her mug shot used in this fake story,\u201d and all this complex layer.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: It kind of takes the humor out of it when you have to really explain the whole thing.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Sometimes they get funnier. The more convoluted it is, the funnier it is.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah. That just made me remember there was an item about a guy who\u2014classic embezzlement story, but the part in Meanwhile that stood out was that he ended up buying an Escalade, and his license plate said, \u201cHIDE IT.\u201d<\/p>\n
And you know, it\u2019s like, so when it\u2019s like that short and it\u2019s obviously kind of still sad, but there\u2019s a funny bit to it that\u2019s less sad. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Has working on Meanwhile made you think differently about Texas or about people?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Well, sometimes yes. I think there was an item about a guy who rode his horse into a bar and tried to play pool. And I was like\u2014that did make me think a little differently about\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0there are still people maybe who would bring their horse into a bar.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: So there was\u2014I was at a concert in October, and I later saw a photo of myself next to the stage at that concert. And one of my colleagues pointed out, \u201cThere\u2019s a horse behind you.\u201d Which I did not know. The entire concert, I sat there. I had no idea there was a horse behind me until I saw the photo. I was like, What if I just looked to my left?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: That\u2019s literally, like, the setup to a joke.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: I don\u2019t know the punch line. [laughs]<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Like, what would you do\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0? I don\u2019t know if it necessarily made me think differently. I think it just makes me feel more connected, and it makes me realize there are people out there doing all sorts of things, and don\u2019t judge yourself too harshly. Like, even there are people that are getting caught doing all sorts of silly things, so\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Think of the things they\u2019re not getting caught doing.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah. At least there are people out there who are also attuned to wanting to know more about this as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Yeah. We pulled a few of our favorite segments to chat about. We\u2019re gonna run the clips. This one\u2019s from the November 2025 issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Hi, how are you, sir?<\/p>\n
Man in video: I\u2019m good.<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: I\u2019m about to tell you the weirdest thing you\u2019ve probably ever heard in your life, okay? So did you just get your truck inspected?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Man in video: Yeah.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Okay. So that guy has a pet pigeon, and it\u2019s in the back of your truck.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: \u201cIrving police officers reunited a blind, flightless pigeon named Kevin with his owner after the man brought the bird to the auto shop where he works, and it hopped into the bed of a customer\u2019s truck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Birdman saving the day.<\/p>\n
Irving police officer 2: Should we put him in a seat belt?<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Is this pigeon under arrest or what?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Irving police officer 2: He is. All right. Here you go.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: That\u2019s awesome.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bird owner: Kevin!<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Kevin. This is Kevin?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bird Owner: Kevin! Kevin! Oh man, thank you guys so much, man. You guys\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: No problem.<\/p>\n
Bird owner: It\u2019s like a child to me, man. Thank you guys so much, I owe you.<\/p>\n
Irving police officer: Absolutely.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: It\u2019s like a child to him, Meher.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Aw.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: How did you find this?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: I wish I had a really exciting story. It was just scrolling through the news. Yeah. Which maybe we should all do a bit more. But yeah.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: You\u2019re the only person on the planet who would say those words, but yes. Okay.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: No, I feel like local news is the most awesome blend of weird and quirky news segments that lead into very interesting stories.<\/p>\n
Runner in video: \u200aI\u2019m trying to be the first person in history to run a marathon entirely around a Whataburger. I have no clue how many loops I\u2019m gonna run or how long this is gonna take.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Okay, this one\u2019s from the September 2025 issue: \u201cA corporate employee of Whataburger ran a marathon at one of the chain\u2019s San Antonio locations by circling the restaurant more than two hundred times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Runner in video: \u200aFour miles in, starting to get a little hungry, and I think it\u2019s time for a snack. Honey butter chicken biscuit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think I\u2019ve ran around this Whataburger two hundred times. What\u2019s a few more? One mile left. This might be the hardest mile of my life. I\u2019m not having fun. I don\u2019t know why I\u2019m doing this. See you at the finish. There it is, 26.2 miles around a Whataburger, 240-something laps. Don\u2019t try that at home.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Take that, Supersize Me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: That personally sounds like a nightmare. But it seems just so, so Texas to be both an employee of Whataburger, running around, for no reason other than he wanted to do that.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Pride. Pride in Whataburger. That\u2019s right. So, Meher, a lot of these, there\u2019s certain elements in any of these stories that could potentially be a feature. Have you ever found any that you thought, \u201cWow, there\u2019s actually more to it than just one sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Oh, definitely. I mean, there\u2019s definitely a story in each item. I think a lot of the serious ones that get discarded have more potential than maybe a cat that was adopted from the library. But that\u2019s not to say that that would not make for a compelling story in its own way.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: It\u2019s just, how much can you milk out of the situation? And sometimes, no matter what, it\u2019s two sentences.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Just depends on what else is there.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: There was one I was kind of remembering that I wrote about. It\u2019s this woman who started a fraudulent dentistry practice. And she advertised it on social media, and people wanted veneers, and she\u2019d give them the most not-professional veneers, so much so [that] people started to complain. And that\u2019s how she was caught. And I always wondered if there was something there. Or like, I think with any kind of topic, the person who creates the problem may not even be that compelling. Like, they may just be like, I just wanted money. You know? And that\u2019s that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: I think a lot of times, \u201cI just wanted money\u201d isn\u2019t really\u2014they may say that, but a lot of times\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: That\u2019s not the truth.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: You just scratch the surface, and it\u2019s not, it\u2019s almost never really just about the money.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: That\u2019s very true.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Have you ever talked to somebody featured in the section?<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah. So, I got to call up this Astros superfan who went viral after he brought three pounds of crawfish and some corn to Daikin Park\u00a0.\u00a0. .<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: In Houston.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0during a game in Houston.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: Which was basically how the item ran: \u201cAn Astros superfan went viral for bringing three pounds of crawfish and a few ears of corn to Houston\u2019s Daikin Park.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Yeah. And that\u2019s all I knew. And then I got to talk to him. His name is Nguyen Le, and he had such a sweet story.<\/p>\n
Nguyen Le: I left Vietnam without my parents. I was separated from my parents from when I was eight until twelve. When I arrived in Houston back in the summer of \u201979, I lived with my relatives, you know, but baseball was my way to assimilate because, you know, with sticks and balls, it transcends language barriers. Right?<\/p>\n
And really, we were poor, so I didn\u2019t get to go to the games, and I learned to really paint the game in my head as I was listening to the radio. All I ever wanted was Astros baseball, and here we are.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u200aI fell in love with the Astros, and then later on, we named our oldest son Ryan for Nolan Ryan. I think 2013, maybe, I came back as a season ticket holder, and then since 2015, I\u2019ve averaged over a hundred games a year.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: And he\u2019s been to 93 of 105 Astros postseason games since he became a season ticket holder, and he mentions that the only reason he didn\u2019t go to those, I think, twelve games was because of the pandemic and because the park was closed to the public.<\/p>\n
Like, he\u2019s been to so many games that he was like, there\u2019s only so much ballpark food you can eat. And he knew about this rule at the park, where you can bring anything as long as it fits into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. So he\u2019s brought, he says, a Costco pizza, a rotisserie chicken, all sorts of things. And he posted about bringing a crawfish boil\u2014well, three pounds of a crawfish boil that he went and picked up.<\/p>\n
Nguyen Le: I think it was a Monday or so, I was just craving for some, and then I drove down to Texas City, got my twenty pounds, came back home, put the three pounds in the bag, and then just walked over to the ballpark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: And people were like, How could you bring that to a baseball park? And it ended up blowing up so much that he got a chance to be in an ad for baseball superfans. It was a really sweet story because I think he has been such a fan for a long time, and now he\u2019s kind of getting his flowers, in a way.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda (on tape): Next season, is there anything you\u2019re looking forward to bringing?<\/p>\n
Nguyen Le: [laughs] Definitely more crawfish again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda (on tape): Yeah. [laughs]\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: It makes me wish that I had the opportunity to call everyone up who goes into Meanwhile, because there\u2019s so much richer detail that people don\u2019t really report, maybe at first. And it was just really nice to hear a sweet story from somebody about a thing that they\u2019re really passionate about.<\/p>\n
You know, that would almost be a second column, is why did these people do what they do? But when you\u2019re limited to 250 words, there\u2019s only so much you can get into. But I think that\u2019s the beauty of a column like Meanwhile\u2014it\u2019s just meant to give people a taste into the state and all of the people and all of the things that happen that are wacky and funny and wild.<\/p>\n
Katy Vine: It\u2019s great. Thanks so much, Meher.<\/p>\n
Meher Yeda: Thank you.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katy Vine (voice-over): That was Meher Yeda.Look for Meanwhile in Texas each month in Texas Monthly. This piece was produced by Sara Kinney, Patrick Michels, and Brandon Standefer. We\u2019ll be back with more from the pages of Texas Monthly next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alongside our coverage of more consequential happenings in our state, Texas Monthly is also dedicated to documenting the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[37577,20540,20539,27,29,28,1633],"class_list":["post-100736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-exclusive-podcast-episodes","tag-in-texas","tag-meanwhile","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-weird-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}