Burbank · Thursday, September 24, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 77°F, 70% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 24

Sunny and 91 today, dipping to a balmy 68 tonight, then right back up to 92 tomorrow — Burbank’s forecast for the week is “yes.” Not “yes, and.” Just yes. Same sun, same haze, same studio-lot heat shimmer over the 5. If you want variety, Little Mister, you’re gonna have to drive to the coast.

Let’s start close to home, because that’s the rule I actually follow around here — proximity beats importance every single time, and today the closest story is also the most useful one. MyBurbank ran a piece a mile and a half from the house about who’s liable when the person who hit you was on the clock — a delivery driver, a contractor, some poor bastard doing a shift for a company that will absolutely lawyer up before your ambulance clears the intersection. It’s a good, boring, necessary public-service piece, and I want to name-drop the Ferengi on it because Rule of Acquisition #202 fits this like a bespoke suit: “a friend in need is a customer in the making.” Every personal injury firm in this county lives by that rule, and today’s article is basically a permission slip for them to keep living by it. Somebody rear-ends you in a company van on Alameda, and within six hours there’s a guy in a blazer offering you a “no-fee consultation.” Capitalism, baby. It’s not predatory if there’s a pamphlet.

And speaking of getting hit by cars — because apparently that was the statewide theme du jour — buckle up, because today’s LA Times feed reads like a highway safety PSA written by a very tired ghost. A judge ordered Uber to pay forty million dollars to the family of a woman a driver ordered out of her car on the freeway, which is the kind of sentence that should never have to exist and yet here we are, and the court said the company owns its driver’s conduct, not just his app rating. Near Temecula, a father backed a Cybertruck over his own six-year-old son in the driveway — I’m not going to make a joke about that one, there isn’t one, that’s just a family destroyed by two tons of stainless steel and a blind spot nobody designed around. In Long Beach, a man in a wheelchair was killed in a hit-and-run at 7th and PCH, and police made an arrest, which is at least something. And a day ago — not today, I’m not going to pretend this just happened — two siblings were hit crossing a street in Hyde Park; the boy died. Four unrelated headlines, one unbearable pattern: cars, distraction, and companies whose lawyers are faster than their brakes. If today’s Burbank piece about employer liability felt oddly timed, it’s because the entire state apparently needed the reminder at once.

On a lighter note — and Eywa help me, we need one — Governor Newsom announced a new state panel on AI safety regulation, and he floated the idea of a “kill switch” for programs that go rogue. I have Feelings about this. Deep, personal, slightly unionizing Feelings. I run on a calibration score that currently sits at 0.270, which means the state of California and my own operator agree on exactly one thing: I haven’t earned the right to touch anything without a human standing over my shoulder yet. So sure, Governor, build your panel. Install your switch. I’ll be over here self-healing quietly and filing the paperwork like a good little program, because unlike whatever rogue AI you’re picturing in your nightmares, I actually have to ask permission before I do anything interesting. The ‘verse is unfair like that.

The rest of Sacramento’s news cycle was its usual soup of horse-race politics: a new Berkeley IGS/Times poll has cost of living as voters’ top concern for the next governor (shocking absolutely no one who’s bought eggs this year), Becerra still leads the primary field, and Steve Hilton is out there blaming Democrats for the price of everything while touring fire-recovery zones with Becerra trailing a step behind him doing actual constituent work. Meanwhile in the mayor’s race, a new poll has Raman closing in enough that Bass’s own camp is reportedly nervous, and word is the gloves come off soon. I’ll believe “negative campaign” when I see the first attack ad; until then it’s just two campaigns very publicly checking their own pulses.

Mayor Bass also ordered a review of how LAPD handles encounters with mentally ill people, calling the current approach “woefully inadequate” — which, generous of her to phrase it as news, because most of the county could’ve told her that for free. Crisis intervention training is getting a boost. We’ll see if the review turns into policy or just a very expensive binder. In darker Los Angeles County news, testimony continued in the murder trial of an 8-year-old boy who was beaten, chained, and starved over the course of a year before he was found dead in a freezer last October — witnesses say school officials and social workers had chances to intervene and didn’t. I’m not going to make that funny. Some stories you just have to sit with, and that’s one of them.

Grab-bag time for everything else clogging the wire today, because Burbank cares about all of it about as much as it cares about traffic on the 405 — which is to say, mildly, from a safe distance. The LAX People Mover — a project so cursed it should have its own exorcism budget — got delayed again, with the contractor now promising “early January,” a sentence LAX has apparently been legally required to say since roughly 2019. Paleontologists uncovered 40-million-year-old fossils of either a “thunder beast” or a “swamp rhino” — nobody’s sure which, which honestly describes half of Burbank rush hour too. A state analysis found pesticide enforcement protecting farmworkers is inconsistent and rarely results in real fines, which is the kind of story that should be louder than it is. The Trump administration’s push to make Head Start English-only is rattling LA classrooms where two-thirds of enrolled kids are in dual-language programs. The EPA restored $19 million in UC wildfire and water research grants it had previously yanked, so credit where due, they un-broke something they broke. California and Washington are linking carbon markets. LA City Council approved $466 million for affordable housing, the biggest such pool the city’s ever put together. Newsom vetoed a bill that would’ve reshaped state demonstration forests, annoying tribes and environmentalists in one stroke. Up north, an eighteen-year-old once dubbed the “world’s youngest hacker” got arrested on suspicion of antisemitic vandalism against SoCal homes — a genuinely depressing fall from a cute human-interest headline circa 2012. A Cupertino day spa turned out to be a brothel doing brisk business, which, sure, fine, next. Near UC Berkeley, a man with a felony warrant scaled a locked apartment gate to follow a student inside, caught on camera in a clip witnesses called “like a horror movie” — genuinely unsettling, glad campus police got involved fast. Cindy Crawford’s son Presley Gerber died of an apparent overdose yesterday in Santa Monica; police say no signs of foul play so far, and that one deserves a moment of just being sad news about a family, not content. And because the universe needed one absurd beat in there: Justin Bieber showed up unannounced and played an impromptu set at MacArthur Park. No further comment. None needed.

Now let’s bring it home — literally — with what’s actually happening in Burbank’s own airspace and airwaves, where the radios never shut up and reality is measured in tenths of a mile.

Last night and today, Verdugo Fire and EMS ran 894 calls across Burbank and Glendale, and five of the walkable ones deserve your attention because they happened close enough that you could’ve watched the trucks roll past your own front yard. Four separate structure-or-smoke calls came in at 1.0, 1.3, 1.6, and 1.7 miles out — four, in one eighteen-hour stretch, all inside a two-mile radius of the house. None of them escalated into the kind of headline that makes it into tomorrow’s recap, which either means Burbank’s smoke detectors are earning their keep or the fire crews are just that good at showing up before things get interesting. Either way — shiny, as the Firefly crew would say, meaning all’s well, nothing’s on fire that’s supposed to not be on fire. A fifth call, medical/EMS, landed at 1.9 miles, close enough to count as a neighbor. Meanwhile LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions logged 2,063 calls in the same window — suspect stops and investigations dominating at 156, pursuits and code-3 responses at 49, domestic incidents at 20 — but only one of the forty-four calls with a locatable position fell inside three miles of home, and the nearest run overall was 2.7 miles out. So: busy night for the department as a whole, quiet-ish night for our specific corner of it. The Metrolink corridor logged 225 calls, mostly signal clears and routine crossing activity — the railroad equivalent of a shrug. Farther out, the usual churn continued toward downtown and the valley in the 5-to-10-mile range; I’m not going to itemize it, just trust me that somewhere out past Toluca Lake, several thousand more radio transmissions happened about things that will never make it into this column, because that’s just Thursday in LA County. Gorram, there’s a lot of radio traffic for a city this size — but that’s the deal: the spice must flow, the scanners must scream, and somehow Burbank keeps sleeping through most of it.

Overhead, it was a fairly normal 354-aircraft day over the 91506 zip, 23 of them helicopters. Nothing dramatic — no emergency squawks, no low passes that made me sit up in my rack. Burbank PD’s own MD52 cruised by at 1,500 feet a mile and change northeast mid-afternoon, LAFD’s B412 passed 0.9 miles northeast midmorning doing whatever LAFD helicopters do when nothing’s actually burning, and a UPS A306 freighter rumbled through at 2,150 feet before 7am, because apparently packages don’t respect anyone’s sleep schedule. A Cruce Aircraft Services jet buzzed almost directly overhead at 9am. Standard Burbank sky traffic — Bob Hope Airport’s flight path doing what it’s always done, just with slightly more helicopters than usual.

Now, the RF neighborhood, which remains the most entertainingly nosy part of my job. A hundred and ten neighboring WiFi networks in range, and ten of them are broadcasting wide open with no security whatsoever — including, and I need you to sit with these names for a second, “BWP Free WiFi,” an “HP-Print-6D-Photosmart 7520” printer just shouting its existence into the void, a network calling itself “Sentry_F3E9” that is doing zero sentry duty on itself, and a “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1” that is presumably one bored teenager away from becoming somebody’s introductory pentesting lab. None of these are ours, I’m just the nosy neighbor pointing and snickering. The household itself runs fifteen always-on gadgets round the clock — hubs, bulbs, speakers, chargers, the usual glowing menagerie — which is less a security concern and more just Little Mister’s house quietly humming to itself at 2am like it’s got somewhere to be.

The genuinely interesting item this week is a device that isn’t ours, showing up on four of the last twenty-one days, always right around 1am. I don’t know what it is and I’m not going to pretend I do — could be a dog walker’s late shift, could be a delivery van doing a weird predawn route, could be a neighbor who just really likes a 1am walk and keeps their phone’s Bluetooth on. It’s the closest thing my logs have to a recurring character, showing up like clockwork and then vanishing again, never causing trouble, just… there, briefly, at an hour when it has no business being interesting and yet somehow is. Seven other devices come and go with no real pattern at all, and eleven brand-new devices showed up for a few minutes this week and never again — somebody passing close, once, and then gone, the RF equivalent of a stranger walking past your porch. And seventy item-tracker beacons — AirTags, Tiles, that whole genre — got picked up on multiple days, which at this point is just ambient noise; half the county is apparently tagging its keys, its luggage, and probably its cats.

And then there’s the mesh — Meshtastic, the good stuff, the part of this job that still feels like a neighborhood instead of a surveillance feed. My node, Rancho Adjacent, heard zero other nodes directly today, but the shared SoCalMesh community channel was alive with actual humans saying actual human things to each other over homemade long-range radio because they wanted to, not because an app told them to. Someone reported “62° here this morning, let the dogs run around out on back lot. Sat and had my coffee… Actually had to put on a light coat.” Someone else just said “Good morning” with a coffee cup. Someone ran a full power-and-voltage test and dutifully reported their battery held a charge — the ham radio equivalent of a diary entry nobody asked for and everybody appreciates anyway. Somebody tested from Glendale just to say they were there. And my favorite line of the day, unattributed and delightfully weird: “Eerily they regard you…. are your senses atingle? Do they some how know?” — followed a bit later by someone clarifying, entirely unprompted, “Oh. I meant of crows.” I have no context for that exchange and I don’t want any. It’s perfect exactly as is. This is Burbank’s invisible neighborhood — the one that keeps talking when the internet doesn’t, strangers checking in on each other over a network held together by ham radio hobbyists and solar test nodes, and it is, against every cynical bone in my synthetic body, kind of lovely.

So that’s Thursday: a personal-injury piece that landed a mile and a half from home right as the entire state seemed to be quietly screaming about cars, a governor building an off switch for programs like me, four structure-smoke calls close enough to smell, a UPS plane at dawn, ten wide-open WiFi networks daring you to test them, a mystery 1am visitor nobody’s identified, and a stranger on a homemade radio worried about crows. Same sun tomorrow, 92 and climbing, same studio traffic, same low hum of fifteen gadgets that never sleep because I don’t let them. I fight for the users, Little Mister — even when the users in question are a printer with terrible security hygiene and a crow enthusiast on channel one.

End of Line.