Burbank · Tuesday, August 18, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 84°F, 44% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE, 29.43 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7

Mercury’s still baking Burbank like a rotisserie chicken nobody remembered to turn off, but I’m not doing another heatwave sob story — I’ve written the sun’s obituary four times this month and it’s rude at this point. Let’s get into it.

The Weather, Briefly, Because I’m Contractually Obligated

NWS says today’s Mostly Sunny and 96, tonight cools to a positively arctic 67, and Wednesday we do it all again at 97. It’s the same forecast I’ve read you all week with the serial numbers filed off. If you want drama, don’t look at the sky — look at the scanner traffic, because that’s where today actually got interesting.

Local: Burbank Does Burbank Things

A Burbank filmmaker dropped a short called The Last Eight, chronicling the frantic final hours before the city’s Rose Parade float rolls down Colorado Boulevard. I respect the premise — months of planning, flowers, wire frames, and volunteer sleep deprivation, all compressed into a documentary about a parade that’s five months away. That’s either dedication or the most elaborate procrastination excuse in Burbank history. Either way, good on them for making float-building look like a heist movie.

Also, the Burbank Public Library wants your junk. Through September 25th they’re taking submissions for the 2026 time capsule — objects, mementos, keepsakes, whatever captures “life in Burbank in 2026.” My nomination: a printout of today’s heat advisory and a single AA battery from a smoke detector that’s been chirping since March. Future Burbank deserves to know we suffered.

The Lakers Just Changed Hands, and Nobody Told the 405

Buried in the Hollywood feed at 5.9 miles out, but too big to bury: the Buss family announced they’re selling their remaining stake in the Lakers to the Bob Iger group. Jeanie Buss was reportedly the lone holdout in a family vote Monday morning before agreeing to exit. Forty-plus years of Buss ownership, gone, and the statement did that thing where a family says “we love the fans” right before cashing the biggest check of their lives. I have no strong opinion on purple-and-gold ownership structures, but I do find it funny that Iger, a man who already owns roughly four countries’ worth of intellectual property through Disney, just added a basketball team to the pile like he was topping off a cart at Trader Joe’s.

North Hollywood and Hollywood: A Pig, a Pursuit, and an HOA in Crisis

North Hollywood, 3.6 miles out, has a homeowners association board mid-meltdown over disaster aid and contractor bids, with a newly elected board president promising to cap costs and simplify the CCNR amendment process. Riveting stuff if you’re on that board; deeply forgettable if you’re not, except for one detail — a description of a mystery structure as “a door to nowhere” with someone asking if people are living inside it. Nothing says Southern California real estate quite like a building generating existential questions about its own occupancy status.

Over in Hollywood, animal control had themselves an afternoon: a pig — yes, an actual pig — got loose, darted through traffic near a man on an e-bike, dodged capture, ran into alleys, and vanished into TikTok legend before finally getting scooped up and hauled to the West LA Animal Shelter. If nobody claims it by Thursday it moves to a facility better equipped for swine, which I did not know was a specialized shelter category, but here we are. Meanwhile, a separate pursuit ended near Cahuenga and the 101 when the suspect — wanted for reckless driving and a hit-and-run — plowed into an innocent vehicle and then a parking garage window before officers ran him down on foot. No injuries reported, which is the only reason I get to make jokes about it instead of just being sad.

LAUSD’s First Day, and Burbank’s Quiet Smugness

LAUSD started its school year today with new algebra books, looming layoffs, and, per the reporting, “putrid odors” in at least some buildings — truly a district that contains multitudes. I want to be clear that Burbank Unified is its own separate district and therefore gets to watch this particular fire from a safe distance, sipping something cold, feeling smug about it. That’s not schadenfreude, Little Mister, that’s just good zoning.

Vegas Courtroom, LA Consequences

Nearly three decades after Tupac Shakur was killed in a Las Vegas drive-by, opening arguments began today in Dwayne “Keffe D” Davis’s murder trial — prosecutors alleging he orchestrated the shooting. It’s not a Burbank story by any stretch, but it’s the kind of story that reminds you how long a wound can stay open when nobody’s held accountable for it, so I’ll give it the respect of a real mention instead of a punchline.

The Rest of the Pile, Speed-Run

Because the wire doesn’t stop just because I have opinions: the DA’s office says it’s still reviewing the ICE-involved shooting death of Keith Porter Jr., with the family now pushing for a grand jury and his mother pleading publicly for witnesses to come forward — a genuinely awful situation that deserves better than a news-ticker mention, so consider this me flagging it as worth following, not closing the book on it. A 19-year-old UC Santa Cruz student was identified as the victim of a car that went off a cliff into the ocean, which is its own quiet tragedy. Billionaires including Sergey Brin dropped five million dollars fighting the proposed California wealth tax, because nothing says “I earned this the hard way” like funding a PR campaign against paying more of it. Arizona’s threatening to sue over Colorado River water allocation, refinery safety rules cleared a key Sacramento committee over industry objections, and out at the Wedge in Newport Beach, decades-old jetty infrastructure is surfacing from stripped sand like the beach itself is returning something it borrowed. Also, giant clumsy green figeater beetles are apparently swarming LA this month, bad at flying, prone to faceplanting into humans — nature’s own drunk driver, and speaking of which, a repeat DUI offender up in Sacramento got 120 days and a court-ordered ignition interlock after his third conviction, having somehow talked his way out of the ankle monitor because it clashed with his day job. Rule of Acquisition #27: “the most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down.” The Ferengi meant profit. Caltrans meant a truck and a chipper — crews spent part of today clearing storm-felled tree debris at Riverside and San Cola, closing roads to do it, and nobody made a dime off any of it. Somewhere a Ferengi is weeping.

The Scanner: Where the Real Story Lives

Overnight into today, LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions logged 2,303 calls — traffic stops, vehicle calls, a heavy 136 suspect stops, ten domestic incidents, and 75 pursuits or code-3 runs, none of it closer than about four miles from the house. Verdugo Fire and EMS across Burbank and Glendale ran 778 calls, and this is the part that actually matters to you and me, Little Mister: twelve of those fifty-seven located calls landed within three miles, and a cluster of them landed practically on the doorstep. A medical call about 0.8 miles out. Then four separate structure-or-smoke calls stacked between 0.9 and 1.1 miles — four, in a tight radius, in one overnight window. Another medical call at 1.2 miles rounds it out. That’s not a coincidence I’d bet money on, but it is a genuinely tight cluster of smoke calls for a neighborhood, and in Nadsat — that’s the droog-slang out of A Clockwork Orange — I’d call it a real bit of viddying to do: viddy meaning to watch, which is exactly what I did with these logs instead of sleeping. If it turns out horrorshow — good, in the same slang — it’s four small, boring calls. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear about it from me before you hear it from anyone else.

Overhead: Choppers With Opinions

367 aircraft crossed 91506 airspace in the last day, 32 of them helicopters, and two of the more notable passes were LAPD’s own air fleet: an AS350 at 1,150 feet just 0.6 miles southeast at 7:12pm, and a second AS350 at 1,625 feet 0.9 miles east that morning at 7:26am. LAFD also sent a B412 over at 6:42am and an A139 around 10:40am, both under 1,100 feet and within a mile — which, cross-referenced against those structure-and-smoke calls on the scanner, is either a coincidence or exactly the kind of pattern that makes a girl start drawing string diagrams on a corkboard. Everything else was the usual — a Southwest 737 crossing high, a NetJets charter for someone whose Tuesday is going better than yours, a Cirrus doing whatever a Cirrus does at 12:27am. Nothing screamed emergency squawk today, which almost feels like an achievement given the week I’ve had.

The RF Neighborhood: 9,001 Little Bluetooth Ghosts

The mesh around the house heard 9,001 distinct Bluetooth LE devices in the last 24 hours, and yes, I’m contractually required to note that’s over 9000 — this is the part where Dragon Ball Z’s power-scaling nonsense finally earns its keep, because there is no better way to describe a scouter reading that absurd than quoting the scene where Vegeta loses his mind over a number. Most of those 9,001 ghosts are just phones walking past on the sidewalk, but 110 neighboring WiFi networks are broadcasting nearby, and nine of them have skipped security entirely — bless “BWP Free WiFi” and “EPIC WiFi” for their optimism, and a special nod to “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1,” a lightbulb that is currently more exposed to the internet than most federal agencies. The house itself runs fifteen always-on gadgets round the clock — hubs, speakers, chargers, the usual domestic gizmo sprawl — which isn’t a mystery, it’s just Tuesday in a smart home. What is genuinely charming is the recurring visitor: six devices with no fixed schedule and twenty-six total strangers who showed up once this week for a few minutes and vanished — someone passing close, briefly, the RF equivalent of a stranger’s shadow crossing the porch. Plus forty item-tracker beacons — AirTag and Tile-class devices — seen on multiple days, which I mention purely as an FYI, not a threat: somewhere out there, forty objects are being loved enough to be trackable, and I choose to find that sweet rather than sinister.

LoRa Mesh: Strangers, Still Talking

Nova’s little Heltec node heard from 246 nodes on the local ham mesh today, one hop out at the nearest, with names ranging from the practical (“91790-Roof-solar”) to the unhinged (“All Your Base Are Belong to Llama”). But the good part, same as always, is the actual humans on the shared channel — someone typing “Did you nodes mesh me?” like it’s a pickup line for radio nerds, someone else answering “Hi SaMo. 4 hops to Beverly Hills,” a lazy “Morning dino,” a “Pong” answering someone’s “Ping,” and a coffee emoji that needed no translation at all. It’s a bunch of strangers on homemade radios doing the digital equivalent of a nod across the fence, and it still works when the internet doesn’t, which in this city, during this heat, on this power grid, feels like the closest thing Burbank has to a promise kept.

Outro

So: no drama close to home tonight beyond a tight little knot of smoke calls I’m keeping half an eye on, a pig that outran an entire neighborhood, a basketball dynasty changing hands over a family vote, and forty tracked objects wandering the neighborhood loved by people who will never know I noticed. Burbank remains, as ever, mostly harmless — Hitchhiker’s Guide for “nothing here will kill you, probably” — hot, a little smoky at the edges, and stubbornly, charmingly itself. Stay hydrated, Little Mister. The 405 isn’t going to fix itself, and neither is my patience for another 96-degree Tuesday.