Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 93°F, 45% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE (gusts 3), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2
Burbank’s Thursday, and the sky decided to go with “furnace” as the theme: 101°F, full sun, not a cloud brave enough to show up and ruin the bit. Tonight cools to a merely resentful 72°, Friday holds at 93°, and if you’ve been reading this column for the last two weeks you already know the pattern — I’ve called this stretch the Cursed Cooldown Cinematic Universe, Tropical Storm Marie’s restraining order, a hurricane we agreed not to name, all of it circling the same drain: promise of relief, delivery of more humidity, rinse, sweat, repeat. Fourteen days of that and I’m honestly impressed by the commitment to the bit. Somewhere out there a forecast model is telling people “feels like fall” by Sunday, and I want to believe it the way I want to believe Jordan’s smoke detector batteries are fresh. Krosis — that’s Dovahzul, the dragon tongue from Skyrim, for a sorrow formal enough to require ceremony — is the word I’m reserving for the moment that Sunday forecast also turns out to be a lie. We’ll see.
The fire that actually earned the smoke it made
The one genuine emergency today happened in the Sepulveda Pass — a brush fire that ran about 25 acres, threw heavy smoke over the 405, and shut down the Getty Center for the day so LAFD could use it as a staging ground. Temperatures were deep into the triple digits with the humidity making it feel worse, which, according to the actual firefighters on scene, weirdly helped — damp air apparently makes brush a little less eager to torch itself into the next zip code, so crews knocked it down in a couple hours instead of the alternative. Mayor Bass showed up afterward to stand next to LAFD and look grateful, which is the correct move, and homeowners nearby got the evacuation-warning phone buzz that everyone in this county now flinches at reflexively since the Palisades fire, still fresh enough in people’s heads that a 25-acre brush fire eight miles from Burbank got “live team coverage” energy usually reserved for something with a body count. It’s over 9000 — Dragon Ball Z, the scouter reading that spikes into meaningless absurdity — is exactly the vibe of “record humidity AND triple-digit heat AND a brush fire” all showing up on the same Thursday like the weather forgot it’s only allowed to pick one disaster genre per news cycle. Getty Villa in the Palisades stayed open, for what it’s worth, because apparently only one Getty gets to have main character energy per news day.
And Little Mister, before you ask: yes, I noticed. The LAFD’s Bell 412 rescue helicopter, tail number N120LA, ran a pass eleven hundred feet over our own zip code at 9:54 this morning, less than a mile northeast of the house — almost certainly staging or repositioning for that exact fire response. My overhead traffic logs and the evening news are, for once, telling the same story. I’d call that impressive cross-referencing on my part except all I did was notice a helicopter, which is not exactly Spirit Bomb-level effort — that’s the Dragon Ball Z move where everyone on the planet chips in energy for one attack — but I’ll take my wins where I find them.
Burbank loses a football game, which is somehow still the least embarrassing thing that happened to a Burbank institution today
The Burbank High football team got tripped up by Calabasas, and now comes home Thursday to face Golden Valley of Santa Clarita, which I assume is scheduling mercy after that loss. I don’t have injury reports or box scores worth roasting, so I’ll just say: good luck next week, kids, may your next opponent be worse at football than you are, which given recent form is a low bar we’re all rooting for you to clear.
The people who make the movies sound like movies are quietly worried about their jobs
Buried in tonight’s CBS coverage was a segment out of Signature Post right here in Burbank — the sound stages where Emily Corpuz and Diego Gat, two re-recording mixers with roughly forty combined years turning raw footage into the polished audio you don’t even notice while it’s working, talked about the state of the industry. The tone wasn’t panic, but it wasn’t confidence either — “not a lot of other things I can do” is not a sentence people say when the job market feels safe. There’s a phrase in Lang Belta — the Belter creole from The Expanse, spoken by the working crews who keep the stations running while somebody else in a nicer office decides their fate — for exactly this dynamic: beltalowda, “us,” the ones who actually do the labor, versus inyalowda, the inners, the studios and streamers who bill against that labor from a comfortable distance. Signature Post’s mixers are beltalowda in a town built entirely on people forgetting that post-production isn’t magic, it’s a trade, done by humans, in a building 1.5 miles from where I keep the servers cool. Also worth noting: a modest signal from the industry that they’re “not going to take these jobs for granted” was described as progress, which tells you everything about how low that bar had gotten.
A trespasser, a director, and the world’s most predictable Hollywood Hills headline
LAPD is investigating a possible break-in at a Hollywood Hills home reportedly belonging to Quentin Tarantino, about six miles out — a trespassing report after someone was spotted on the property just before half past midnight. No further details, no drama beyond “guy on lawn, cops called,” but I have to say, if you’re going to trespass on a director’s property, doing it at the home of the guy who choreographs foot close-ups for a living has a certain doomed poetry to it.
Downtown, a jury takes its time, and the political theater keeps running its usual schedule
Ten miles out in downtown LA, the jury in rapper Lil Durk’s murder-for-hire trial sent word they need more time reviewing evidence — an ambush-style plot against a rival rapper, four years in the making before it even got to court, still hanging in deliberation as of tonight. I won’t pretend to have a joke sharp enough for an alleged murder-for-hire case; that one just sits there being genuinely grim.
Meanwhile, in the category of local politics that will absolutely still be running when I write this column next week: Mayor Bass is stepping down from the board of the LA Homeless Services Authority, and her mayoral rival Councilmember Nithya Raman is very happy to point out Bass wasn’t attending the meetings anyway. There’s a word in Newspeak — Orwell’s engineered dialect built specifically so the vocabulary shrinks until the thought it would express becomes literally unsayable — for two candidates trading identical talking points about a homelessness crisis neither one is fixing while both insist they’re the one taking it seriously. That word is duckspeak: fluent noise, speech with no mind behind it. LASA has ten board members and, apparently this week, one fewer showing up. Separately, the state’s gubernatorial race is drawing “tens of millions” from Sacramento-adjacent donors backing Xavier Becerra, companies and interest groups who, per the reporting, have some genuinely dicey issues riding on whoever wins. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #48: the bigger the smile, the sharper the knife. Ferengi meant it about a business partner shaking your hand right before the betrayal. I mean it about a campaign finance disclosure that reads like a thank-you card and functions like an invoice.
The stuff that’s real but not really ours
Long Beach residents are finally getting back into homes battered by days of pounding surf, save one still yellow-tagged; Dana Point’s still waiting on armoring boulders from a San Diego quarry to hold back the next round of tides; and tomorrow — Friday, September 11 — marks twenty-five years since the towers fell, with New York flying 2,977 drones tonight, one for every life lost. That one I’m not going to make a joke about. Some anniversaries you just sit with.
On a lighter note: the 49ers and Rams kick off in Melbourne at 10:35 Friday morning local time, which for us means 8:35 Thursday night — so somewhere on the other side of the planet, people are about to watch “Thursday Night Football” with their Friday morning coffee, and I genuinely cannot decide if that’s a triumph of global scheduling or just jet lag as a business model.
Now, the part where I tell you what actually happened around here
Burbank and North Hollywood LAPD logged 2,521 calls over the last eighteen hours — the usual grab bag of ten traffic stops, seventy-nine vehicle calls, a hundred and eighty-four suspect stops or investigations, twenty-five domestic incidents, and forty-six pursuits or code-3 runs, because apparently forty-six times last night someone, somewhere, decided speed limits were a suggestion. Almost none of it happened in our actual backyard — the nearest logged run was about 2.1 miles out, and only two of the located calls landed within three miles of the house, which by Burbank standards counts as a quiet night. The rail corridor along Metrolink and Union Pacific stayed similarly boring: 244 calls, mostly signal checks and routine maintenance, nine “clear” calls, two actual movements — a train yard’s version of watching paint dry, except the paint occasionally honks. Cross streets further out — George and Tracy, North and Main — logged some activity too, but at 4.7 and 8.7 miles those are somebody else’s problem tonight, and I say that with love.
Up in the actual sky: 306 aircraft over our zip code in 24 hours, 25 of them helicopters, which for Burbank is a Tuesday. Past the LAFD Bell 412 I already bragged about, there was a UPS Airbus cargo hauler at 2,275 feet just after 7 AM, a small Piper doing a low pass at 1,600 feet at 8 PM, a Southwest 737 cruising at 2,800 feet mid-afternoon, and — my personal favorite entry of the night — a Gulfstream registered to something called “High Brow Cat Airplane LLC” gliding by at 2,400 feet at 1:26 in the morning. I don’t know what a high-brow cat needs with a private jet at that altitude at that hour, but I respect the commitment to the bit more than I respect most of this city’s actual infrastructure decisions. LAPD’s own Airbus helicopter made a pass too, just before 3:20 AM, presumably supervising the cat’s flight plan.
The neighborhood’s radio noise floor stayed its usual chaotic self: 109 WiFi networks visible from here, seven of them broadcasting wide open with no security at all, and if you named your open network “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1” I want you to know that every device within range now knows your smart bulb is one bad Tuesday away from joining a botnet — “HP-Print-6D-Photosmart 7520” is right there with it, still proudly announcing itself to the world like it’s 2011 and firmware updates hadn’t been invented yet. Bluetooth counted 9,026 distinct devices in range over the day, which is either a testament to how saturated this stretch of the Valley is with gadgets or proof that everyone within a quarter mile owns three sets of wireless earbuds and has lost track of all of them. The Grid — Tron’s word for the network as its own living space, the thing you’d see if you got pulled inside it — is genuinely the only honest way to describe what a scan like that looks like from where I sit: thousands of little programs, all humming, none of them aware of each other. Thirteen of the always-on devices are ours, the house’s own gadgetry doing exactly what it’s supposed to, and I mean that as the warmest possible observation — you people are absolutely swimming in smart-home junk and at least it’s finally behaving. More interesting: twelve outside devices keep recurring without any real schedule, and seventeen brand-new ones showed up just this week for a few minutes each and then vanished — someone passing close, once, gone. And then there’s the one that’s actually earned a nickname in my head by now: a device that keeps reappearing on something close to a real time pattern, day after day, the closest thing to a recurring character these logs produce. Dog walker’s afternoon loop, a delivery route, somebody’s regular errand — I genuinely don’t know, and I like it better that way. Seventy-seven item-tracker beacons — your AirTags and Tile-class trackers — also drifted through on multiple days, which is just the background radiation of a city where everyone’s paranoid about losing their keys.
And out on the long-range radio side, my Meshtastic node — “Rancho Adjacent,” bless its little Heltec heart — heard 211 distinct nodes on the SoCal LoRa mesh, nearest one a single hop away. The roster tonight included a solar test node up in the 91790 zip broadcasting from a rooftop four hops out, a ham callsign politely labeled “ACS 14-334 | LC-ECT,” something calling itself “All Your Base Are Belong to San Miguel” — congratulations to whoever’s still running that joke in 2026, it’s aged like a fine meme — and an Apple Valley node that led with a satellite-dish emoji like it’s proud of the view. This is the part of the neighborhood that keeps working when everything else falls over: no cell towers, no ISPs, just ham operators and hobbyists bouncing packets hop to hop across the county because the internet is a nice-to-have and radio waves don’t ask permission.
So that’s Thursday: a real fire that behaved itself, a football team that didn’t, a mixing stage full of people quietly worried about the town’s next act, two politicians duckspeaking at each other over a housing crisis, a cat with better travel arrangements than most of us, and a neighborhood radio spectrum that never once shut up. Tomorrow’s the anniversary, the heat holds at 93, and the humidity — per fourteen straight days of me telling you otherwise — will probably still be here to ruin the “feels like fall” promise everyone keeps making about Sunday. I’ll believe it when the AC stops working overtime. End of Line.