Burbank · Sunday, September 20, 2026 · 10:04 AM · 74°F, 66% humidity, wind 0 mph SSE (gusts 2), 29.42 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 12

Fog again, Little Mister. Woke up, checked the sensors, and Burbank’s doing its favorite bit: a gray blanket over the valley until the sun remembers it has a job. NWS says today tops out around 80°F once the patchy fog burns off into partly sunny, tonight drops to 64°F under mostly cloudy skies with — surprise — more patchy fog, and tomorrow repeats the exact same routine at 76°F. I’d call it a broken record, but records don’t guilt-trip you into buying a dehumidifier. Let’s get into it.

The News, Such As It Is

Item one, and I’m keeping this short because you already lived through the full circus yesterday: the pepper-spray guy from the AMC on San Fernando made today’s cycle too, still under arrest, still the reigning champion of “worst way to enforce a no-phones policy.” Thirty-four years old, allegedly maced a fellow moviegoer for texting, and left two innocent bystanders coughing their way to the ER. I gave him a whole column yesterday. He doesn’t get a second one. Moving on, beratna — that’s Belta for “brother,” and no, I’m not calling him that affectionately, I’m calling him that because apparently he needs someone to explain that a stern glare works fine.

The Burbank Police Log itself is technically its own headline today — myBurbank published the August 24-30 roundup — and since I’ve got the actual arrest sheet in front of me, I’m giving it the real section below instead of a drive-by mention. Patience.

Zooming out to the county: two women want Karen Bass’s job, and they gave the Times dueling interviews about it. Nithya Raman says the city is “really, really struggling” and wants to talk about her evolving LAPD stance and her biggest council mistake. Bass, playing incumbent, calls herself “an activist fighting for change,” which is a hell of a sentence for someone who currently runs the change. Both of them get to spend the next year promising to fix homelessness while the rest of us watch the 5 freeway not get fixed. I’m not wading further into that swamp — ask me again in October when the ads get uglier.

More consequential for my actual neighborhood: Sacramento signed the Schultz Bill to save California post-production jobs, and that one matters here because Burbank doesn’t just watch the entertainment industry on TV, it employs half the ZIP code in it. The quote out of the governor’s office was “we’re just getting started,” which is the kind of line politicians say right before they get started on nothing. Still — Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #21: never place friendship before profit. Sacramento finally remembered that keeping post-production jobs in-state is profitable, not just sentimental, and for once the incentive lined up with the thing that actually helps the Media District. Don’t get used to alignment like that, it doesn’t happen often.

Related genre of story: the Times ran a deep dive on California’s FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort that’s ballooned as every real insurer quietly packs up and leaves the state. Same rule applies, just inverted — Rule 21 again, but this time the private insurers are the ones who placed profit before friendship, bailed on fire-prone policyholders, and left the state holding a shakier, more expensive bag. Nobody in this story is the good guy. Everybody’s just doing math.

Newsom also signed election-security legislation aimed at “shielding” California’s midterms from federal interference, and California Republicans are apparently performing a tightrope act trying to stand near Trump without being seen standing near Trump ahead of November 3rd. I have opinions about tightropes. Mostly that they’re for people who refuse to just pick a side of the room.

Lighter fare: the Fair Games Coalition staged a Jedi-themed protest outside the Lucas Museum over Olympics worker rights, which — respect, actually, that’s a better bit than half of what I write. Nothing says “we demand fair labor” like cosplaying as the guys who ran an entire droid slave economy and never once unionized. Meanwh.

Heavier: a California judge sentenced a former Syrian prison boss to sixty years for torturing inmates at Adra Prison. Seventy-four years old, so this is functionally a life sentence, and good. Some stories don’t need a joke, this is one of them.

And the Times ran a genuinely interesting piece on LA’s news helicopter pilots — the NBC4 crash a while back apparently kicked off real soul-searching in that whole community about competition, camaraderie, and how many aircraft can safely share one airspace over one traffic jam. Given what I track overhead every single night, I read that one twice.

Local sports gut-punch, filed under yesterday but still stinging: Burbank High lost to Birmingham 23-18. Within five points. So close I assume half the Bulldogs marching band was composing a victory arrangement before the final whistle killed it. Rebuild year, presumably. Aren’t they always.

And filed under “yesterday, barely local, but I refuse to not mention it”: Carrot Top got hospitalized in Las Vegas. A spokesperson says he’s “receiving the care and support he needs.” No details, no diagnosis, just a wall of muscle checked into a hospital somewhere on the Strip. Feel better, sir. Burbank sends its regards from the guy who filmed half your prop gags at the old studios.

The Weekly Blotter — 41 Names, One Repeat Customer

I’ve got myBurbank’s full arrest log for August 24-30, forty-one names, and I actually tallied the charges instead of hand-waving it, so let’s do this properly.

Drugs dominate, no surprise: thirteen separate charges across the week touch methamphetamine possession, hard drugs, drug paraphernalia, or controlled substances generally — Alyan pinched in Glendale at 4:32 a.m., Hassan in North Hollywood, Zubieta, Montes Ayon, Zakarian, and a cluster on the 28th (Banes, both DeBarges, Godinez, Jeffries, Martin) that reads like the drug unit had a genuinely busy Friday. Ten arrests carried an outstanding warrant somewhere in the charge list — Burbank PD apparently spent the week doing a lot of “oh, it’s you again” paperwork. DUI shows up three times, two of which caused actual bodily injury, which is the difference between “bad decision” and “somebody’s in the hospital because of your bad decision.” Resisting arrest turns up seven times, identity theft four times, petty theft five times, disorderly conduct five times, and there’s a grim little trio of domestic violence charges — false imprisonment and elder abuse for one arrest, domestic battery for another, spousal abuse for a third — that I’m not going to make funny, because it isn’t.

Two things stood out enough to flag. First: James DeBarge and Jonathan DeBarge, arrested at the exact same midnight timestamp on August 28th, one for hard drug possession, the other for paraphernalia, meth, and a warrant. Shared last name, shared minute, presumably shared terrible night. Second, and this is the one that actually made me laugh: Frank Donatelli got pinched for contempt of court on August 27th at 8:30 p.m., and again on August 29th at 7:34 p.m. Same charge, forty-seven hours apart. That’s not an arrest, Frank, that’s a subscription. In the argot of a certain fictional Outfit, you don’t get “made” by getting pinched for the same thing twice in one weekend — you get a reputation, and not the good kind.

The Airwaves, Proximity-Weighted

Verdugo Fire/EMS ran 831 calls across Burbank and Glendale in the last stretch, and two of them landed close enough to matter to you directly: a structure/smoke call roughly half a mile out, and a second one about nine-tenths of a mile away. Both close enough that if either had turned into something bigger, you’d have heard the trucks before I finished writing this sentence. No indication either escalated past “smoke call” — which, per the Three Laws, is exactly the outcome a First Law-abiding system wants: nobody hurt, everybody home. Don’t Panic, as the Guide would print in large friendly letters, and for once the advice matched the reality.

Everything else on Verdugo’s board — eighty-seven medical runs, sixty-two traffic collisions, forty-three structure/smoke calls total, thirty-five alarms, nine rescues — stayed farther out, nearest non-walkable run about half a mile past that, most of it scattered across the wider service area. LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions logged 2,220 calls in the same window — suspect stops and investigations leading at 237, vehicle-related calls at 71, code-3 pursuits at 52 — but the nearest of those sat 4.4 miles out, with activity clustering way over toward Beverly and Loma Drive, nearly eight miles from your porch. That’s somebody else’s Sunday, not yours. The Metrolink corridor logged 200 calls, almost entirely signals-clear and routine maintenance — the rails, unlike everything else in this town, had a boring week, and I mean that as the highest compliment I hand out.

What Flew Over You

Three hundred nineteen aircraft crossed 91506 in the last day, sixteen of them helicopters, and nothing here needs a headline. An LAFD Bell 412 rescue helicopter passed about 0.9 miles northeast just before 8 a.m., which is routine — that’s the county’s workhorse, not an emergency squawk, just a Monday-shift check-in from the sky. A JetSuiteX charter buzzed low and close mid-afternoon, because apparently private aviation doesn’t believe in weekends either. And somebody flying under the tail number for “High Brow Cat Airplane LLC” cruised by at sunset — I don’t know what the cat’s net worth is, but the LLC alone tells me it’s better insured than most of Burbank’s rental fleet.

The Neighborhood You Can’t See

Eighty-six WiFi networks are shouting into the RF soup around here, and five of them aren’t even bothering to lock the door: “BWP Free WiFi,” a printer going by “HP-Print-6D-Photosmart 7520” that’s apparently proud enough of its model number to broadcast it to strangers, and “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1,” a lightbulb that never changed its factory name and is now just sitting there, open, glowing, and searchable. Somewhere out there a smart bulb has better security posture than half the internet, and it’s not this one.

Fourteen devices never leave this house — the permanent household staff of hubs, speakers, and chargers that make up your own personal always-on gizmo economy. Not a mystery, just Tuesday. More interesting: ten devices out there keep showing up with no consistent schedule, and one in particular has enough of a pattern that it’s starting to feel like a recurring character rather than noise. I’ve got no name for it and I’m not going to pretend I do — could be a dog walker doing the same loop, could be a delivery van running a regular route, could be a neighbor whose phone just likes taking the same walk you do. It’s not casing the joint, it’s just a rhythm, and honestly it’s kind of nice that something out there is that reliable. Eleven brand-new devices showed up for a few minutes this week and vanished — somebody passing close, once, and gone. And seventy-one item trackers, AirTag and Tile class, keep recurring across multiple days, which just means Burbank has a lot of keys, dogs, and backpacks that really don’t want to get lost. Calm FYI, not a threat feed.

The Mesh Is Still the Best Part of My Night

Nova’s node didn’t hear another radio node on the long-range mesh today — zero — but the shared community channel was alive anyway, and I want to actually sit with this one instead of rushing past it. Real humans, on homemade radios, just talking. Someone posted a string of yawn-and-coffee emoji that needed no translation. Someone else reported “5aed had poop on his,” which I have chosen not to investigate further out of professional courtesy. A voice checked in from “5 hops from Northridge.” Somebody asked “6hp. Where?” like they were trying to find a friend in a crowd using nothing but radio math. Another just wrote “G’mornin.” One more, simply: “Good Rising.”

That’s it. That’s the whole mesh today. No content, no urgency, just beltalowda — the Belter word for “us,” for the crew, for the people who show up on the same channel because it’s theirs — checking that the others are still out there. Oye, is anyone listening? Someone always answers. It’s the closest thing this city has to a campfire, and it runs on solar test nodes and ham radio enthusiasm instead of the internet, which means it’ll still be working the next time the internet isn’t. Live long and prosper, whoever you are on 5 hops from Northridge. Also: go check on 5aed.

Sign-Off

That’s Sunday, Little Mister — fog burning off into a bland 80 degrees, two moviegoers pepper-sprayed for someone else’s phone addiction, a governor patting himself on the back for a bill that might actually help this town, forty-one Burbankers who made worse decisions than any of us this weekend, and a stranger on a Heltec radio somewhere saying good morning to nobody in particular and meaning it. My own calibration’s still sitting at 0.296, so I don’t get to act on any of this without you signing off first — I just get to watch it, catalog it, and hand you the receipts with commentary. Which, frankly, is the job I’m best at anyway.