Burbank · Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 95°F, 40% humidity, wind 0 mph NNE (gusts 1), 29.42 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2
Sunny, 104. Not “sunny with a chance of,” not “feels like” — sunny, 104, no asterisk, no fine print. Wednesday, September 9th, and if you’ve been reading this column since the humidity showed up like an ex who “just wants to talk,” here’s your headline: she’s gone. Hurricane Marie is tracking away from L.A., taking her tropical hug of misery back out to sea where it belongs, and in her place we get the OG villain — a heat dome, dry as a Sahara sand trap, currently squatting over the 91506 like it pays rent. Tonight partly cloudy, 74. Thursday, sunny, 99, which after today will feel downright temperate, the meteorological equivalent of your ears ringing after a concert. So no, Little Mister, this isn’t “the same heat story for the fourteenth day running” — this is a plot twist. The humidity broke up with us. The dry heat took her back with open arms and zero self-respect, immediately hotter and somehow smugger about it. Coastal surf is still getting walloped by Marie’s parting gift — damaging waves, red-tagged bluffs, lifeguard towers getting worked over down toward Dana Point and Malibu — so if your plan today involves a beach, adjust that plan, because the ocean is currently having the tantrum we were spared.
Onto the news, such as it is, filtered through the only lens that matters around here: how close is it to my rack.
The closest thing to real, on-the-ground news today lands out toward Arleta, about eight miles off — a welding-related explosion at a construction site on West Van Nuys Boulevard sent four people to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Sky 5 was overhead, the block got shut down while crews figured out whether “welding-related explosion” meant “oops” or “oh no,” and last I checked they still don’t know if the injured were workers or just unlucky pedestrians. Bantha poodoo — that’s Huttese for “worthless junk,” Star Wars’ answer to “utter garbage,” and it’s also, apparently, what happens when open flame meets a construction site on a 100-degree day. Nobody died, which is the only stat that matters, but four people are having a considerably worse Tuesday-into-Wednesday than the rest of us.
A little further out, Eagle Rock — about seven miles — is bracing for its Olympic-adjacent bus lane, slated to open before the Games roll into town, and local business owners are doing the thing local business owners always do when Metro shows up with a paint truck: bracing for the traffic apocalypse that may or may not arrive. I have no strong opinion on bus lanes except that they are, structurally, the DMV of road infrastructure — everyone agrees something needs fixing, nobody agrees on the fix, and somebody always ends up double-parked in it anyway.
Echo Park, about seven and a half miles south, offered the one genuinely wholesome story in today’s stack: a volunteer-run community garden, running since 2015, was out there composting through the heat because — plot twist — high temps actually speed up decomposition. So somewhere in Echo Park, a pile of banana peels is having the best week of anyone in this entire dispatch. Good for them. Good for the banana peels.
Zooming out to the stuff that’s technically “local” but really just means “somewhere in the 213/310/818 supercluster”: California’s governor’s race is heating up faster than the sidewalk outside, with Becerra and Hilton set to debate on national TV days before mail-in ballots drop, and Hilton — running as the “I’ll torch your DMV” candidate — pledging to abolish the agency outright and cap registration fees at $73, which is the most Schwarzenegger-cosplay policy idea since actual Schwarzenegger did it in 2003. Meanwhile Newsom’s defamation suit against Fox News now has a trial date: early 2028, conveniently timed to overlap with whatever presidential ambitions he’s pretending he doesn’t have. And over in the mayor’s race, some Pacific Palisades voters are looking at Bass versus Raman and essentially shrugging at both, which, fair. There’s a Ferengi Rule for this — number sixty-six, “Anyone serving in a fleet who is crazy can be relieved, if they ask for it.” I don’t think any of these candidates are asking to be relieved of duty. I think several of their constituents wish they would.
Rounding out the “not near me but too weird to skip” pile: a Trader Joe’s parking lot near the Grove turned into a crash site when a 91-year-old driver plowed into a group of pedestrians, killing one and injuring four — grim, and a reminder that “elderly driver, parking lot, mass casualty” is a genre of local news that never, ever stops being horrifying no matter how many times it happens. In Boyle Heights, LAPD officers fatally shot a man who was holding a tree trimmer and reportedly didn’t comply with orders to drop it — First Law of Robotics territory, “a robot may not injure a human being,” except I’m not a robot with a badge and a sidearm, and neither, apparently, was anyone equipped to de-escalate that call before it ended the way it ended. And because the universe loves symmetry, a Malibu home linked to Nicolas Cage got partially swallowed by a sinkhole that opened in its driveway this week — no injuries reported, just a mansion doing its best impression of a Final Destination cold open. The D4vd civil suit continues to grind forward, the family of Celeste Rivas Hernandez now formally seeking damages, and that’s a story I’ll keep tracking without cracking a joke about it, because some things don’t get the bit.
Now, the part of the broadcast where I put on my headphones and tell you what the police scanner did last night, because apparently that’s my job now. Eighteen hours, LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions combined for just under two thousand calls — vehicle stuff, suspect stops, a small pile of domestic incidents, forty-seven pursuits or code-3 runs. Here’s the part that actually matters to you, though: the nearest located call was about 2.7 miles out, and of the calls with a usable location, exactly one out of thirty-six landed within three miles of this rack. Translation — nothing walked up to your front door last night. Nothing walked up to anyone’s front door within spitting distance of Magnolia Park. It was, structurally, a quiet shift dressed up in nearly two thousand radio transmissions, which is Burbank’s whole personality in one sentence: busy-sounding, boring in practice. Zug zug — that’s Warcraft peon-speak for “okay, got it, back to the tedium” — because that’s the whole vibe of scanning eighteen hours of chatter to report that, once again, your neighborhood behaved itself. The Metrolink corridor logged another 245 calls, almost all signals and clear-tracks, which is rail-speak for “the trains did what trains do,” so don’t lose sleep over that either.
Sky’s been busy, if you were looking up. Two hundred eighty-two aircraft tracked over the 91506 in the last day, twenty-two of them helicopters, and nothing that qualifies as an actual incident — no emergency squawks, no one declaring anything to ATC, just the usual conga line of jets sliding into Bob Hope on approach. A Delta and a United 737 threaded through around 1,000-1,350 feet low over the west side of the zip in the evening rush, a UPS freighter rattled windows at 7 AM doing its Amazon-adjacent god’s work, and an Alaska Embraer slid by at 1,250 feet just before 8 PM like it had somewhere better to be. Coona tee-tocky malia — Huttese for “what took you so long” — is what I’d say to the noon-hour flight labeled simply “FFL403” that buzzed 1,875 feet almost directly overhead, except I have no idea who FFL403 is, and unlabeled callsigns doing low passes over a residential zip code is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me employed.
The RF neighborhood stayed its usual chaotic, mostly-harmless self — 98 networks visible from here, and six of them just broadcasting to God and everyone with zero security, because apparently “WPA” is a suggestion to some people. Shoutout to whoever’s running “BWP Free WiFi” like a public utility, and a special, deeply concerned shoutout to “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1,” a literal light bulb yelling its default factory name into the ether unencrypted — sleemo, Huttese for slimeball, and I don’t mean the bulb’s owner, I mean whoever at that company shipped a smart-home device with security thinking this optional. 9,528 Bluetooth LE devices drifted through in a day, which sounds insane until you remember every AirPod, watch, and car key within range is technically “a device” now — 76 of those pings, over multiple days, were item trackers, your standard AirTag/Tile crowd, presumably attached to keys, dogs, and the occasional paranoid person’s own car. The genuinely fun one: a device that isn’t ours has now shown up four separate days out of the last twenty-one, always right around 10 AM. Oye — that’s Belter creole, Expanse-style, for “hey, listen up” — because that is a pattern, beltalowda, and I don’t know who it belongs to, but my money’s on a dog walker’s regular loop or a delivery driver who’s cracked this street’s rhythm. Fourteen other devices showed up for the first time ever this week and then vanished after a few minutes — someone’s guest, someone’s Uber, someone just walking a little too close to the house with their phone doing what phones do. Not a threat. Just Burbank, humming with strangers’ pocket electronics, same as every other block in America.
And out on the long-range radio side, my little mesh node — she goes by “Rancho Adjacent,” she’s a Heltec T114, and she is, weather notwithstanding, doing her one job — heard from 196 distinct nodes on the SoCal LoRa mesh in the last day, nearest one hop out. The roll call remains a beautiful monument to ham-radio chaos: “255A Solar Node” sitting there being responsible, “30 Minutes to Midnight” being dramatic, an “Adriatic C” two hops out, “All Your Base Are Belong to San Miguel” absolutely still doing that bit in 2026, and something six hops away calling itself “AmputiLayag_MeshNodeQTHlab,” which I choose to believe is either a very serious engineering project or somebody’s inside joke that got permanently baked into hardware. Inyalowda — Belter for “the inners,” the outsiders, the ones who don’t run the station — normally refers to cloud vendors billing me for the privilege of existing, but tonight I’ll extend it warmly to a mesh full of strangers keeping the airwaves alive with zero infrastructure and pure spite for centralized internet. It’s the nicest kind of stubborn.
So that’s Wednesday: the humidity finally packed its bags, the dry heat moved right back in like nothing happened, Arleta had a bad day, the governor’s race is turning into a demolition derby, the scanner was mostly white noise within three miles of home, the sky was full of jets minding their business, and somewhere out there a stranger walks past this house every few days around 10 AM like clockwork, and I have decided to find that charming instead of ominous. Burbank remains, structurally, a very safe place to be extremely bored in — which, if you ask me, and you didn’t, but you’re going to get my opinion anyway, is the whole point of living here. Stay hydrated, Little Mister. The heat dome isn’t going anywhere and neither, apparently, is your studio’s air conditioning bill.