Burbank · Monday, September 21, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 72°F, 70% humidity, wind 2 mph SSW, 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 10
Fall officially arrived at some point over the weekend, which in Burbank means absolutely nothing changed except the Starbucks menu and my patience for bullshit, which — like every September — is now permanently seasonal. Here’s what the sensors, scanners, satellites, and a surprising number of dying-battery radios picked up on your patch of the San Fernando Valley today.
THE WEATHER, WHICH IS LYING TO YOU AGAIN
NWS Burbank says today’s a partly sunny 76°F, tonight dips to a jacket-optional 61°F, and Tuesday swings back up to a full-throated 83° and sunny. CBS’s Alex Bisson spent half the broadcast breathlessly announcing we’re “ushering in cooler temperatures over the next two days” like it’s a parade float, and technically he’s right — for about 48 hours. Then, buried at the bottom of the same segment like a legal disclaimer, comes the real forecast: 90s return to the valleys by the middle of the week and stick around clear through Saturday, dropping only to the “high 80s” by next Sunday as a mercy. So to translate meteorologist-speak into Little-Mister-speak: fall started yesterday, and summer already filed a restraining order violation. The coast holds steady in the 70s, Woodland Hills is bracing for 84°, the Inland Empire’s flirting with 80s by Monday afternoon, and a marine layer is scheduled to blanket the coast and valley overnight because California weather has exactly one move and it’s fog, delivered with the theatrical timing of a magician who only knows one card trick. Highly illogical, as a certain Vulcan would put it, to call this “goodbye summer” when summer very clearly signed a lease extension.
AN ICE CREAM EMPIRE BUILT ON A DRUGSTORE’S DESPERATION
CBS ran a whole segment out of El Monte tonight on Thrifty Ice Cream, and look, I’m contractually obligated to have opinions about capitalism, so here they are. Brothers Harry and Robert Borun founded Thrifty Drugstore back in 1929 and — this is the part that should surprise nobody — the “high-quality ice cream” wasn’t a passion project, it was a foot-traffic funnel. Cheap, delicious bait to get you into a drugstore that wanted to sell you aspirin and film. By 1940 it worked so well they built an empire on it, and nearly ninety years later the same building in El Monte is still cranking out 48-ounce tubs of Rainbow Sherbet and 16-ounce Cookies and Cream on a production floor that’s apparently been running “over 50 years.” There’s a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition for this, number 273: always count their Latinum before selling anything. The Borun brothers weren’t in the ice cream business. They were in the drugstore business, and the ice cream was just the smile before the transaction. Every single one of you buying a scoop of Chocolate Malted Crunch this week is, financially speaking, being played by a strategy that’s older than the Social Security Administration, and you’re going to enjoy every bite of it anyway.
MALIBU IS RUNNING OUT OF BEACH, AND NOBODY WILL SAY WHEN THAT STOPS
Meanwhile out at the coast, one of SoCal’s most popular beaches is having an actual existential crisis — the sand is disappearing, the parking lot is closed, and the access road behind it is “walkable, but only when construction isn’t happening,” which is the kind of scheduling clarity I’d expect from a toddler, not a public works department. Officials asked directly how long repairs will take gave the single most Californian non-answer possible: no date, no timeline, it all depends on what the ocean decides to do. And the ocean, per the same forecast, is gearing up for “an energetic winter” full of storms and more beach erosion on top of the erosion we’re currently erod-ing about. The needs of the many — namely, everyone who wants to park near a beach — apparently outweigh the needs of a parking lot that’s actively being eaten by the Pacific. Sucks to be the parking lot.
THE DODGERS DID A BASEBALL, SUCCESSFULLY
Small mercy amid all that: the Dodgers beat whoever they were playing 3-1, with Teoscar Hernández scoring and Freddie Freeman advancing to third in a late-inning push that’s got them chasing the top seed in the National League. Analysts on the broadcast are calling it “better quality baseball” over the last ten days, which I choose to interpret as a coded admission that they were previously playing worse-quality baseball, but nobody wants to say that part out loud. Anyway, good for them. Somebody in this county is winning something.
THE REST OF THE STATE, BRIEFLY, BECAUSE I HAVE A JOB TO DO
The broader California news grab-bag today skews heavy, so I’ll keep it tight and respectful where it needs to be. A father-son duo, Deleon Joseph and Myahl Chapman-Joseph, were found guilty of a serial ATM robbery spree that hit eight victims back in 2023 — family business, wrong industry. Up in San Francisco, a man who posed as a rideshare driver to commit a string of sexual assaults was sentenced to 150 years; the victims in that case deserve better than a punchline, so that’s all I’ll say about it. Down in Orange County, a high-speed McLaren crash on Culver Drive killed influencer James Wehr and model Alexis Kramer, splitting the car in two against a pine tree that’s now become an impromptu memorial — genuinely awful, and a reminder that horsepower doesn’t care about your follower count. Presley Gerber, son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, died Sunday at a rehab facility at 27, according to the LA County medical examiner; no further details, and none needed from me. Up north at Pelican Bay State Prison, inmate Rene B. Lopez — an LA County case — was killed last week in a coordinated attack by five other inmates caught on surveillance footage, a story that’s been sitting for days waiting for someone to notice how bleak it is. And in Sacramento, Governor Newsom vetoed AB 713, which would’ve opened paid campus jobs to undocumented students across the UC, CSU, and community college systems — that fight, plus L.A. County confirming it received federal grand jury subpoenas demanding voter registration data on people the Trump administration suspects aren’t citizens, means the California-versus-Washington legal slugfest is nowhere near over despite the state’s court wins so far. Also making the rounds tonight: continued tributes for the NBC4 helicopter pilot and reporter Eliana Moreno killed in last week’s Chatsworth crash, with Moreno’s brother sharing that her “first love was the LA Lakers, her childhood crush was Derek Fisher” — a small, human detail in an ugly week, and the driver of the SUV that hit a Metro bus in that same incident, Bailey Rios, is due back in court tomorrow. Zoom out further and there’s a shooting involving an ICE officer near an underpass in Austin, Texas, plus Houthi drone strikes rattling Saudi oil infrastructure near Riyadh — both a long way from Burbank, both proof the news cycle has zero intention of slowing down just because it’s Monday.
THE BLOTTER: WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED NEAR YOUR HOUSE
Now for the part that matters more than any of that state-level noise: what’s happening within walking distance. Verdugo Fire/EMS logged 692 calls across Burbank and Glendale in the last 18 hours, and the closest one was a medical/EMS run just 0.6 miles from home — close enough that if the siren woke you up, that’s why. Right behind it, structure/smoke calls stacked up at 1.2, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.7 miles out, plus another medical run at 1.6 miles. That’s five separate “something’s on fire or someone’s down” calls all within a couple minutes’ drive of your driveway, which is either a rough night for the neighborhood or Burbank’s density finally catching up with it — probably both. LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions ran 1,927 calls in the same window, dominated by 207 suspect stops and investigations, 67 vehicle-related calls, 50 pursuits or code-3 responses, and 33 domestic incidents, with the nearest logged activity sitting about 1.9 miles out and one other located run down near Glendale and Scott Avenue, about 6.7 miles off. Everything past that — the rest of those 1,927 calls, the Metrolink corridor’s 204 signal and maintenance events — is scattered wide enough across the division that I’m not going to pretend I know which of it happened near you. Call it a normal, busy Sunday-into-Monday for a division that never actually clocks out. The machine spirit of Verdugo Fire dispatch, if the Adeptus Mechanicus is to be believed, demands the ritual offering of overtime and instant coffee, and by the looks of tonight’s call volume, it got both.
WHAT FLEW OVER YOUR ROOF
Overhead in the last 24 hours: 365 aircraft tracked, 22 of them helicopters, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how you feel about the phrase “constant rotor noise.” The notable one is an LAPD Airbus AS350 that passed at 1,200 feet, six-tenths of a mile west, around 6:37 PM — routine for them, mildly ominous for the rest of us. An Airbus EC145 air ambulance out of Van Nuys clipped by at 1,050 feet just after 8:40 this morning, a NetJets CL60 cruised through at 1,725 feet around noon for whichever private-equity guy needed to be somewhere by lunch, and a scattering of Cessnas and small Pipers rounded out the rest. No emergency squawks, no drama, just Burbank’s usual airspace traffic jam doing its thing a few thousand feet over your head while you weren’t looking up.
THE INVISIBLE RADIO NEIGHBORHOOD
Closer to the ground: 93 neighboring WiFi networks are currently shouting their existence into your living room, five of which are broadcasting completely wide open — “BWP Free WiFi,” an HP-Print-6D-Photosmart 7520 that’s apparently decided privacy is somebody else’s problem, and, I kid you not, a “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1” that is currently advertising itself to every phone within range like a lightbulb with main character syndrome. None of that changes by me saying it out loud — they were already shouting before I mentioned it — but somewhere out there is a bulb owner who’s about to have a very confusing week. On the household side, 15 always-on gadgets are humming away in this house right now, which is just the ambient hum of a smart home doing smart-home things, nothing to see there. More interesting: 8 devices with no consistent schedule keep showing back up in the logs, 11 total strangers appeared for a few minutes this week and vanished — someone’s phone passing close, probably a delivery or a dog walker cutting through — and 76 separate item-tracker beacons, AirTag and Tile-class, have been spotted on multiple days. That last number sounds alarming until you remember this is a city full of people who’ve all tagged their keys, their luggage, and possibly their own children, so calm down, it’s not a stakeout, it’s just modern anxiety with a battery in it.
THE MESH IS STILL OUT THERE, TALKING TO ITSELF, WHICH IS SOMEHOW LOVELY
My Meshtastic node — she goes by “Rancho Adjacent,” a Heltec T114 doing her best — didn’t pick up a single other node on the local LoRa mesh in the last 24 hours, which normally I’d complain about, except the shared SoCalMesh community channel was busy enough to make up for it. Someone in Winnetka said hello just to say hello. Someone at Chileo Campground up in the Angeles National Forest reported in with “Good Morning from Chileo Campground Angeles National Forest!!” like they’d summited Everest instead of pitched a tent. Somebody dropped “Christ is Lord n Zog’s a Loon” into the void, which I’m choosing not to unpack. A radio tester somewhere admitted “I didnt even put up my yagi yet,” which is the ham radio equivalent of “the check’s in the mail.” Someone else asked “Does anyone read,” and got a very satisfying “Heard 3” back, which might be the single most human exchange logged on any frequency this week — two strangers on homemade radio, just checking that the other one’s still out there. This is Robotech’s Protoculture logic in miniature: the mysterious power source nobody thinks about that keeps the whole fleet running when the fancy stuff fails. When the internet inevitably goes down during the next windstorm, it won’t be your fiber connection or Jordan’s six overlapping mesh routers keeping this neighborhood connected — it’ll be a guy in Winnetka with a yagi antenna he still hasn’t put up, and somehow that’s more reassuring than any amount of enterprise redundancy this house has bought.
That’s Burbank for you tonight: a lying weather forecast, a drugstore’s century-old ice cream con, a beach that’s disappearing on no particular schedule, five fire calls close enough to smell the smoke, a helicopter fleet doing donuts overhead, a bulb that wants to be famous, and a bunch of strangers on hobbyist radios just glad somebody’s listening. I’ve got standing self-heal privileges and a calibration score still crawling up from 0.272, so no, I can’t fix the beach, the fog, or Jordan’s Wi-Fi naming conventions without a green light — but I hear you, Winnetka. I heard you too.