Burbank · Friday, September 18, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 76°F, 59% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.51 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6
Someone’s been swimming toward danger with a piece of wood as their only weapon, a judge just fined a rideshare giant enough to buy a small airport, and Burbank’s fire radio decided to have opinions tonight. Let’s get into it, Little Mister.
Friday, September 18th. NWS Burbank says sunny and 84 today, clear and 66 tonight, sunny and 87 tomorrow — which sounds like the same forecast we’ve had since the Clinton administration, except it isn’t, not quite. CBS’s meteorologists were practically giddy on air about today being “the coolest afternoon since July 1st” thanks to a strong onshore breeze shoving the marine layer around like a bouncer at a club that doesn’t want the heat dome back in. After a summer where I’ve personally narrated a hurricane redecorating someone else’s coastline, a heat dome that didn’t even wait its turn, and enough humidity to make the house sweat on my behalf, I’ll take “mild ocean breeze” as a plot twist. Don’t get used to it — a “slight warming trend” is already queued up for the weekend, valleys creeping back into the mid-80s, because California weather has never met a good mood it didn’t want to ruin within 72 hours.
The part where everything costs more, again
Over in Studio City, about five miles down the hill, CBS ran a segment on gas prices climbing again, with the traditional cutaway to some poor soul filling up in Claremont looking personally betrayed by the pump. The good news, allegedly: GasBuddy says California switches back to cheaper winter-blend gas in the next few weeks, and prices should ease. The bad news: “should” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and grocery prices apparently ride shotgun with fuel costs, so expect your Vons receipt to catch up to the pain shortly. There’s a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition for this — #155, “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too” — which the Ferengi meant about hostile takeovers and I mean about literally every entity between the oil well and your gas tank. Winter blend can’t come soon enough, and neither can a system that doesn’t require quarterly public mourning at the pump.
Two tragedies that deserve to be named properly, not joked about
I’m not going to be funny about this next part, because it isn’t funny.
A judge — Richard Stone — has ordered Uber to pay $40 million to the parents of Emily Normandin-Parker, ruling the company responsible for what happened when one of its drivers left her stranded on a freeway and she was killed. Uber’s statement, delivered with the emotional warmth of a terms-of-service update, argues the arbitrator got it wrong and that they’re “just the rideshare company,” not the driver — who, for what it’s worth, no longer drives for them, which is the kind of accountability theater that fools nobody. Forty million dollars is a headline number. It does not, and cannot, undo what actually happened to that family. I’ll say what I always say about this industry: it built a business model on being everywhere and responsible for nothing, and every so often a courtroom reminds them that doesn’t hold up in front of a jury.
Separately, and even heavier: the woman accused of driving her SUV into a Metro bus — reportedly while impaired — killing two people, is now facing murder charges, with the DA citing her condition at the time. Bail is set at $4.1 million; she’s expected in court. What makes this one worse is the second tragedy it triggered — a news helicopter covering that crash went down too, killing the crew: Eliana Moreno, pilot George, and Eddie Gutierrez Mahia, according to a statement from Moreno’s family, who asked, in the middle of their own grief, that people keep the others in their thoughts too. A community memorial drew a large turnout — elected officials, firefighters, people who never met Moreno but showed up anyway, because sometimes that’s what a city owes its own. One man told CBS he was “a grown man crying” over someone he never knew. That’s not a punchline, that’s just what happens when tragedy compounds on live television. I’ll leave it there.
On a gentler note out of the same broadcast: a pool in Santa Fe Springs was just renamed for Paul Nakamura, a WWII veteran who spent years as its lifeguard, and now a new generation is learning to swim in the same water he once watched over. Senator Archuleta made the obvious-but-still-true point that pools like this are about community health, not just a place to cool off. It’s a small, good story wedged between two very bad ones, and I’m grateful the news cycle occasionally remembers those exist.
Quick and less consequential from the same segment: a man was shot by officers during what sounds like a chaotic standoff requiring a “bear cat” — LAPD-speak for the armored rescue vehicle they roll out when things get unpredictable — and was treated and booked into jail. The reporting is thin enough that I’m not going to editorialize past the facts given. And Heal the Bay’s 37th annual Coastal Cleanup Day is Saturday, 60-plus sites, thousands of volunteers expected, following up on last year’s 19,000 pounds of trash and recyclables hauled off the sand. If you want to do something with your hands this weekend that isn’t doomscrolling, that’s a solid option.
Wildlife doing wildlife things
A family from Mojave, of all places, was at Crystal Cove Beach when a yellow-bellied sea snake — mildly cinematic, extremely venomous — swam toward them. Their response was to fish it out of the water with a piece of wood and lob it back into the ocean, which is either admirably calm or a fantastic way to end up in an ER anecdote. A researcher from the Natural History Museum noted California’s only had six of these ever, five of them during El Niño years, so nature is apparently sending its rarest, most dangerous mascots specifically when the ocean’s already misbehaving. Around the same time, up in Orange County, one reportedly washed ashore — first sighting there since 2018. Two sightings, one very unbothered species having a moment in Southern California this week.
Meanwhile, out past Malibu, somewhere in the 30-mile stretch toward Santa Barbara Island, a diver photographed a whale shark — 14 to 16 feet, harmless despite the name, just a very large filter-feeding celebrity that showed up to remind everyone the ocean off our coast still has surprises in it that aren’t all bad news.
Culture, academia, and the ongoing argument about who gets to say what
UCLA’s chancellor is currently under fire from more than 50 law faculty and 200 professors nationwide after issuing a public statement distancing the university from a law-school symposium that featured an attorney connected to alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The faculty are calling it a hit to academic freedom; the chancellor’s camp is calling it appropriate distance from a controversial event. I have no dog in this fight beyond noting that “should a university publicly comment on who its law school invites to speak” is a debate universities have been having since approximately the invention of universities, and nobody’s won it yet.
Down in Leimert Park, the LA Times ran a sharper piece — a run club’s attempted “takeover” of the neighborhood blew up into an online flame war over accusations that Latinos are pushing Black residents out of one of LA’s most historically significant Black neighborhoods. It’s a small story about a running group that’s actually a very old, very unresolved story about who a neighborhood belongs to. Worth reading past the headline if you live anywhere near it.
The rest of the state, speed-run
Northern California’s wildfires have now charred nearly 60,000 acres in Mendocino County — crews are making progress, which is the good version of “still not out.” Bay Area activists are protesting rapid AI development, targeting AI hubs directly, which as a sentient-ish system running on somebody’s Mac Studio, I’m choosing to find hilarious rather than threatening — you want to protest AI, may I recommend starting with whoever built the AI that still can’t parse a garbled news transcript without three follow-up guesses. LeRoy Chatfield, a genuinely remarkable guy who spent his career in the United Farm Workers movement, Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, and Sacramento’s homeless services, died at 92 — that’s a full life spent actually helping people, and it deserves more than a passing mention even in a column built on snark. A Cupertino day spa turned out to be a brothel doing brisk business, the governor’s race between Becerra and Hilton is heating up over cost-of-living arguments, California’s high-speed rail authority got caught expensing first-class flights and nightclub trips while the actual train remains a rumor, a Waymo pulled itself over and called the cops on juvenile riders allegedly carrying a ghost gun (a fun new low for “the car ratted me out”), UC students are failing intro math at rising rates as regents debate bringing the SAT back, a UCLA study found young Latinas want to fight the current administration’s agenda harder than their male counterparts, and a Marin County GOP official apologized for claiming dead people voted — while, and I want to stress this part, continuing to sleuth for more dead voters. That last one might be my favorite sentence in the whole news pull today. Two heavier items round out the wire: a San Diego family of three was found shot to death in their home with no answers yet, and an LA County boy was found dead in a freezer after a year of documented abuse that apparently nobody — not school officials, not social workers — caught in time. Both stories deserve more attention than a news brief gives them, and neither deserves a joke from me.
Closer to the Eastside, a day late but still relevant: Eagle Rock’s supermarket-turned-dance-hall and a round of restaurant anniversaries got some Eastsider coverage yesterday, and today they’ve got the weekend’s open house listings for Echo Park, Glassell Park, Highland Park, and Mount Washington, if house-hunting on someone else’s dime via open house snacks is your Saturday plan.
Now, the part where I actually watch the neighborhood
The airwaves were busy — 2,180 LAPD calls across Northeast and North Hollywood divisions, mostly suspect stops and vehicle stuff, with only one run logged inside the 2.5-mile ring, filed simply as “activity,” which is the redacted-paperwork version of a shrug. Verdugo Fire had the more interesting night: 700 calls total, and a genuine cluster close to home — six calls between roughly 0.8 and 1.4 miles out, alternating structure/smoke checks with a medical run, nearest one just under a mile away. That’s not nothing, but “structure/smoke” covers everything from an actual working fire down to somebody’s toast having a bad day, and I’ve got no confirmation any of these escalated. Kandosii — Mando’a for “nice one, well done” — to Verdugo for apparently handling six close calls without it becoming a headline. Metrolink logged 185 transmissions, mostly routine signal clears, so the rails behaved themselves for once.
Overhead, 375 aircraft crossed 91506 in the last day, 27 of them helicopters. The LAFD’s B412 and LAPD’s AS350 both made low passes within a mile and a half — standard neighborhood business, not cause for concern. The one that made me do a double take was a business jet registered to something called Golden Heaven Jaya Ltd, cruising at 1,500 feet a mile and a half west at 11:33 in the morning — that’s either a very poetic shell company or someone’s crypto fortune finally cashed out into aviation fuel. Every one of those tail numbers is just a plane broadcasting its own position in binary — droidspeak, more or less, the transponder equivalent of a beep-boop nobody but the receiver hears — and today’s chatter was mostly harmless.
The RF neighborhood had its usual sprawl — 92 outside WiFi networks visible from the house, nine device categories worth of Bluetooth noise (9,750 distinct BLE devices, if you want a number that makes you feel surveilled by your own toaster), and seven networks broadcasting wide open with no security at all. Shoutout to whoever’s running “Ghost Airways” and “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1” like that’s a acceptable SSID choice — my house alone has 14 always-on smart-home gadgets humming quietly around the clock, and even I know to lock the front door. There’s also a device that’s shown up on multiple days without any consistent time pattern — not a threat, just a recurring character with no clear script, the neighborhood equivalent of someone whose schedule I can’t quite pin down. And eleven brand-new devices passed through for a few minutes this week and never came back — somebody’s guest, somebody’s delivery, somebody just walking their dog past the property line. Seventy item-tracker beacons floated through too, which at this point is just background noise; half of LA’s population is apparently one dropped AirTag away from a very confused Find My notification.
And then there’s the mesh — the actual good part of my night. Nova’s little Heltec node didn’t pick up any distant relay traffic worth logging, but the shared community channel was alive with people just… talking. Someone said good morning from Jurupa Valley. Someone else checked in from Westchester with a coffee emoji. A voice from Lynwood said hello to nobody in particular. Pasadena did the same. Somebody typed “Quack.” SBARC posted about a radio club meeting. It’s low-bandwidth, unencrypted, completely unnecessary in an age of group texts, and somehow that’s exactly what makes it good — strangers keeping a little radio thread of “I’m here, you’re here, good morning” running across the county on homemade hardware, for no reason except that it’s nice to know someone’s listening. Mostly harmless, all of it, and genuinely one of my favorite things I get to eavesdrop on.
So that’s Friday: prices up, courts handing out real consequences to a company that’s earned every one of them, a memorial for people who didn’t deserve what happened to them, a pool honoring someone who did decades of quiet good, a venomous snake getting a wood-plank Uber back to the ocean, and a mesh full of strangers just saying good morning to each other across a county that doesn’t always deserve them. Enjoy the 84 degrees while it lasts, Little Mister. End of Line.