Be Afraid, very afraid

Close Encounters of the Zombie Kind: Three near-misses in one day in westHouston

Truth is often stranger than fiction and I swear every word of this is true.

By lunch time on Halloween I had run into three zombies. In broad daylight!

Mind you, these weren’t the kind of zombies you’d expect to see on a day like Halloween, and surely not until a little later when the sun was down and the ghouls were out in force. No, these were real zombies and infinitely more frightening than the costumed kind.

Zombie encounter # 1

My first experience was with a lady driving her car in my neighborhood. Let’s call her zombie #1.

I was minding my own business, idling at a stop sign. (I'm a big Halloween fan and decorate my west Houston home inside out with ghoulish trinkets. There’s always one last minute idea to enhance my front yard cemetery before the candy troops arrive so I was on my way to Lowe’s to get another spotlight.)

This lady zombie turns onto my street and into my lane aimed straight at my car. If she hadn’t caught herself in time she would have hit me head on.

With eyes focused on something far, far away (like maybe another planet) she slowly glided past my car as if it was invisible.

She never glanced in my direction and her face had no expression (as in, “Hey, I could have just killed somebody.”) Instead, she continued her journey in an oblivious state.

Zombie encounter #2

Barely having time to recover from my first real live zombie encounter on Halloween (I confess my heart was still kind of pounding from it) I was next almost hit by a pair of zombies in the Lowe’s parking lot.

This looked like a husband and wife zombie couple, the husband was driving. He wandered into my lane and I swerved out of their way. As they puttered on to endanger other people, it was obvious they were totally unaware they’d caused a near-death experience.

Mine.

As I bravely (stupidly?) continued my drive toward the store entrance, I marveled at how eerie it was to have two zombie encounters within minutes of each other. Then, lo and behold, I almost ran into (or rather almost ran over) a third zombie!

Zombie encounter #3

He looked for all the world like a normal man as he walked out of Lowe’s and across my lane and into my path.

Zombie #3 looked straight ahead, presumably towards his car, in an apparent catatonic state. I came to a stop and waited for him to shuffle across at a pace that would make a snail look speedy. No, he wasn’t talking on his cell phone or 100 years old. He was just in a zombie state of mind.

Zombie #3 will never know how close he came to making a CultureMap contributor hit a pedestrian.

Superstitious people say bad things come in threes, so hopefully this is the end of my zombie encounter for a while.

As I sat still trembling in my car, however, scribbling this story in the Lowe’s parking lot, I was thinking, did I really need one more spotlight for my Halloween scene?

Or should I play it safe and just go back home?

No way. Even with the threat of Zombies everywhere, my graveyard came first.

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Thanks, Queen Bey

Pop icon Beyoncé donates $100,000 to University of Houston Law School

Photo by Erza Shaw Getty Images

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Pop megastar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has donated $100,000 to the University of Houston Law Center Criminal Justice Clinic through her BeyGOOD Foundation. The gift will allow the clinic to hire fill-time faculty to head it, benefiting the students who study there.

“I am delighted that the BeyGOOD Foundation has made this very generous gift to the UH Law Center,” said Leonard Baynes, dean of the UH Law Center. “Not only will this funding help establish a full-time criminal justice clinic that provides pro bono legal services in our community, but it will also supercharge our already excellent criminal law and justice programming.”

The clinic is one of nine at UHLC. It helps students learn to navigate the criminal justice system, especially on behalf of clients that are underserved by skilled attorneys. People of color are affected disproportionately by a lack of good, ethical representation.

Beyoncé, the most decorated artist in Grammy history and easily the biggest musical star native to Houston, has a long history of advocating for criminal justice reform. She was a staunch supporter of the police reform following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, asking law enforcement to “stop killing us” in a web post. In 2020, she penned an open letter to the Kentucky attorney general asking for justice in the death of Breonna Taylor.

Through her BeyGOOD Foundation, established in 2013, Beyoncé has focused mostly on expanding the prospects of Black-owned business and offering education opportunities to students. Forwarding the cause of legal representation in Texas while also helping out marginalized communities compliments her other philanthropic work.

“At UH Law, we envision a legal profession where ‘everyone has the opportunity to prosper,’ as BeyGOOD envisions, and we will achieve this vision by providing access to strong and effective legal representation in criminal proceedings,” Baynes said. “And together, through this gift, the BeyGOOD Foundation and UHLC will shepherd the next generation of criminal justice attorneys in the city of Houston, the state of Texas and the nation.”