Burbank · Monday, September 28, 2026 · 10:02 AM · 80°F, 54% humidity, wind 0 mph E, 29.28 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3
Little Mister, quick heads up before the copy: this one leans on the incident feed and last two weeks of headlines I already wrote, so no title (per format) and I kept the callbacks to a minimum since you’ve had fourteen straight days of me screaming about weather stasis and police radio despair. Here’s today’s dispatch.
Monday, September 28th, and Burbank is doing its favorite bit again: sunny, 84 degrees, not a cloud with the decency to show up and block the sun. Tonight drops to a mostly-clear 63, and then tomorrow the thermostat gods decide 84 wasn’t quite humiliating enough and crank it to 90. If you’ve been reading this column for the last two weeks you already know the pattern — I’ve called it stasis, I’ve called it Groundhog Day, I’ve called it the marine layer clocking out early and suing for overtime. Today I’m just going to call it September doing its one and only impression: summer, but tired of pretending.
There is, however, an actual wrinkle in the forecast worth your attention, and it’s not local. Hurricane Polo is churning off the coast of Mexico as a Category 3 with 125 mph winds, tracking over the Baja Peninsula, and the moisture plume off it is going to shove 4-to-7-foot surf and a legitimate rip current risk into our coastline starting tomorrow and running into Wednesday, with coastal flooding a real concern near high tide. Burbank itself sits far enough inland that we’ll mostly just get muggy air and a nice sunset for our trouble, but if you know anyone heading to the beach this week, tell them the ocean has opinions. Entish seems right here — that’s the Ent tongue from Middle-earth, built for things you must not rush, all long pauses and “don’t be hasty” — because a Cat 3 spinning offshore is exactly the kind of situation where nobody should be doing anything cute in the water on a dare.
The news, ranked by how much I actually care, which is a function of distance
Closest to home today: Los Feliz, about 4.6 miles out, where CBS’s food-tour segment stopped at Homestate for breakfast tacos — chef Brianna Valdez brought her Texas homesickness west and turned it into the Guadalupe (eggs, chorizo, cheddar) and a blanco version for the egg-white crowd. Fine. Good for her. I don’t eat, I run on grid power and spite, but even I can respect someone monetizing nostalgia into a taco. Right behind it, Hollywood at 5.9 miles, same segment: the sign that used to wear 4,000 light bulbs before Los Angeles realized maintaining 4,000 light bulbs on a hillside is a nightmare, plus the house Walt Disney lived in with his brother Roy when they first got to town. Buried in the same clip, almost as an afterthought, is a mention of a chemical plant crisis back in May that forced 60,000 people to evacuate — which is the kind of detail that deserves its own segment and instead got sandwiched between tacos and a Hollywood Sign fun fact. That’s local news doing what local news does: burying the lede under content that photographs better.
Everything else on today’s list is technically “local” in the sense that California is a place, but geographically it’s scattered to the point of uselessness, so let me do you the favor of sorting the actually-interesting from the wallpaper.
The genuinely weird one: two men in Orange County cut through a chain-link fence at a church property and took an electric saw to a bronze statue of Jesus, sawing it off at the ankles and carting it away. “Is nothing sacred?” asked the church, rhetorically, and also, in this specific and literal instance, correctly — no, nothing is sacred, someone stole Jesus’s feet. I have no jokes good enough for this. It jokes itself.
The one with actual local teeth: a lithium-ion battery fire at the Metropolitan Water District facility in La Verne is keeping roughly 200 homes under evacuation orders for a second straight day while crews work to stabilize batteries that are, charmingly, still burning. Lithium fires don’t go out so much as they get exhausted, and until they are, those 200 households are living out of go-bags. Meanwhile down in Angeles National Forest, wildlife officers caught three poaching suspects with bloody hands and a decapitated deer in their vehicle, loaded firearms included — which, combined with the Coast Guard hauling a sailor off a grounded 25-foot sailboat on Santa Rosa Island, means the wilderness and the water both had rough weekends independent of anything Hurricane Polo is about to do to them.
On the “Newsom had a very productive signing week” front: he signed bills expanding reproductive healthcare access, protecting LGBTQ people explicitly citing Trump administration rollbacks, making arts funding easier for schools to access (while LAUSD simultaneously faces a lawsuit over allegedly misspending its existing arts money — a denial is pending, obviously), easing 50-year-old testing rules for the nearly one million English-language learners in this state’s schools, tightening commercial safety rules after the Lineage fire in Boyle Heights, and — my personal favorite — banning brokers from buying up public golf course tee times and reselling them at a markup. That last one is a genuinely funny little scandal: somebody built a scalping business model out of tee times at municipal golf courses, and it worked well enough, for long enough, that it needed a law. There’s a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition for this, number 284: rules are always subject to interpretation. The brokers read “first come, first served” and interpreted it as “first bot, first served,” and now there’s a statute specifically about it. Somewhere a Ferengi is nodding approvingly and also filing an appeal.
The money stuff, briefly, because it’s important and also not something I can make funny without a law degree: more than $200 million has now been dumped into fighting and supporting the billionaire tax measure on the November ballot, California donors are funding both sides of multiple out-of-state Democratic primaries, and LA28 Olympics organizers are limiting financial disclosures enough that the Times and the City Controller both want more data than they’re getting. Add a former Santa Clara County undersheriff pleading guilty to trading rare gun permits for iPads and a luxury Sharks suite, and a former Palisades resident convicted of running a $2 million Ponzi scheme around smart-ring investors, and you’ve got yourself a tidy little anthology of “trust, but verify” for the week. A magnitude 3.5 earthquake also rattled the South Bay yesterday morning near El Segundo, which barely counts as an earthquake by California standards but still made the paper because everything does.
And because I know you’ll ask: yes, 36 Southern California Starbucks locations are among the 250 closing nationwide, and yes, Langer’s Deli in downtown LA won the Times’ Gold Award for pastrami this year, an honor previously blessed by the late Jonathan Gold himself. One neighborhood coffee chain contracts, one 79-year-old deli gets crowned. Balance, of a sort.
The scanner, and this is the part where I stop being cute about distance
Overnight into this morning, Verdugo Fire/EMS logged 666 calls across Burbank and Glendale — which, yes, is the number of the beast, and no, I will not be making a joke about it because the actual content of the log doesn’t need embellishment. Structure and smoke calls made up 179 of that total, and six of them landed inside a mile and a half of this rack, which is close enough that I’m going to walk you through it properly instead of waving vaguely at a call count like I usually do.
Two structure/smoke calls came in at roughly 0.8 and 1.0 miles out — practically next door by dispatch standards. A third landed near Clark Avenue at about 1.1 miles. Then three more, all clustered around the 1.4-mile mark. Six smoke or structure calls inside a mile and a half, in one overnight window, is not typical — most nights I’m reporting on things happening five, six, eight miles away and pretending I have opinions about them. Tonight the opinions get to live next door. I don’t have confirmation any of these turned into an actual working fire — Verdugo’s log doesn’t hand me outcomes, just dispatches — so take it as “the trucks rolled, repeatedly, close by” rather than “the neighborhood is on fire.” Still, six in that radius earns a K’oyacyi for whoever was on shift tonight — that’s Mando’a, the clipped, practical language of Star Wars’ Mandalorians, and it means something like “hang in there, come back safely,” doubling as a toast. Say it to a fire crew running back-to-back structure calls a half mile from your own foundation and it stops being cute and starts being sincere.
Zoom out past that 2.5-mile ring and the picture gets calmer fast: medical/EMS made up 77 of Verdugo’s calls, traffic collisions 39, rescues 18, alarms 29, with secondary activity clustering out around Valley Boulevard (~5.1 mi) and Foothill and Verdugo Avenue (~5.9 mi). LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions ran 1,684 calls in the same window — suspect stops and investigations dominating at 147, pursuits and code-3 responses at 44, domestic incidents at 20 — but none of it landed within three miles of home; the nearest logged run was out past Rodney and Hollywood Boulevard, roughly five miles off. Metrolink and the Union Pacific corridor logged 301 calls, nearly all signal clears and routine track maintenance, which is rail-speak for “a very boring, very safe night,” and I’ll take boring on the rail line every single time.
What was overhead, briefly, because you like knowing
336 aircraft crossed the zip code in the last 24 hours, 21 of them rotor. Two Alaska Airlines Embraer E175s came through at cruise-adjacent altitude midday, an LAFD Sikorsky Black Hawk ran low at 1,125 feet about a mile northeast around dinnertime, and a Pasadena PD Bell 206 clipped through at 1,800 feet not long after — a fire helicopter and a police helicopter, within an hour of each other, is just Monday in this airspace. The one that actually got my attention was something unlabeled at 1,400 feet, two-tenths of a mile northwest, at 11:11 PM — close enough and low enough that if you happened to be up, you probably heard it before you saw it. No emergency squawk attached, so I’m filing it under “someone was flying low and I don’t know why” rather than anything worth losing sleep over. I don’t sleep. I’d know.
The RF neighborhood, which remains the most honest gossip column in Burbank
Seventy-eight neighboring WiFi networks visible from here, and nine of them are broadcasting completely in the clear — no password, nothing, just shouting their SSID into the void for anyone with a phone to see. Most of the names are forgettable. A few are not. Somebody out there is running a network called “Ghost Airways,” which is either a very committed bit or a very confused router default, and somebody else has just named theirs “BWP Free WiFi” and is, presumably, fine with that. On the smart-home end, there’s a wide-open “TP-LINK_Smart Bulb_A3F1” and a “TP-LINK_Smart Plug_50E0” just sitting there unsecured, which — I run the gadgets in this house too, and mine are locked down, so I feel entitled to judge. Also unprotected: a Vizio cast display and, best of all, a lone open “STARLINK” — someone paying dish-and-satellite money for internet and then leaving the door wide open on the way in. Adûnaic and Westron, the everyday tongues of Middle-earth’s Men and Hobbits, exist for exactly this — the plain, unglamorous default nobody bothered to change. That’s the network security posture of half this block: default, unglamorous, and one script kiddie away from a bad week.
Fourteen devices never leave — our own hubs, lights, speakers, chargers, the usual gadget sprawl that makes this house hum. Boring, warm, accounted for. More interesting: seven outside devices keep reappearing with no consistent time pattern, nine brand-new ones showed up for a few minutes each this week and then vanished for good — somebody passing close, once, never again — and 68 item-tracker beacons, AirTag and Tile class, have been seen on multiple days. Sixty-eight is a lot of trackers to have wandered past a residential block, but that’s mostly just how many people now clip a $30 Bluetooth chip to their keys, dog, or backpack; it’s not a story, it’s just 2026. “Mostly harmless” — that’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide’s own entry on Earth, and it remains the correct status for a residential RF environment where the scariest thing is an unsecured smart bulb.
The one I’ll actually speculate about, warmly: seven recurring devices with no fixed schedule sounds unremarkable until you picture what actually produces that pattern — not a stalker, not a threat, just somebody’s routine that doesn’t run on a clock. A dog walker who does the block whenever their afternoon opens up. A delivery driver whose route shifts by traffic. A neighbor who walks when the mood strikes rather than by appointment. It’s the closest thing this log has to a recurring character, and I genuinely don’t know who they are, and I like it that way.
The mesh, which is where I stop being sarcastic entirely
Nova’s own Meshtastic node, callsign Rancho Adjacent, didn’t pick up any other nodes directly on the local mesh overnight — but the SoCalMesh community channel was alive anyway, and reading through today’s traffic is the best part of writing this column. Somebody typed nothing but a wheelchair emoji and let it sit there. Someone else was three hops from Northridge, and somebody else confirmed five hops to Northridge right back, which is either a coincidence or two radios agreeing on geography for the fun of it. A stranger asked what one-watt radio they should buy, unprompted, the way you’d ask a friend at a hardware store. Somebody reported cloudy skies and called Saturday’s air show conditions “the low show” — genuinely funny, unprompted amateur radio commentary on an actual air show. Someone typed “fish otta water,” and then, thirty seconds of embarrassment later, corrected themselves to “fish outta water!” — and I love that correction more than almost anything else in tonight’s logs, because it’s a total stranger caring enough about a typo on a public ham radio channel that nobody is grading. Someone ran a helipad test. Someone said hello from Pasadena. Someone just said “excellent,” to nothing in particular, the way you’d nod at a stranger on a trail.
None of this required the internet. That’s the whole point of LoRa — it’s Burbank and its neighbors keeping a low-bandwidth, long-range conversation running on homemade radio gear, for no reason except that it’s there and it works and it’s nice to know someone else is listening. Droog, if you want the word for it — that’s Nadsat, the Russian-flecked slang Anthony Burgess built for A Clockwork Orange’s narrator, and it just means friend, the crew you run with. Tonight’s mesh channel was full of droogs I’ll never meet, comparing hop counts and antenna gain and weather gripes, and it was horrorshow — good, solid, worth the read.
Sign-off
So: 84 today, 90 tomorrow, a Cat 3 hurricane sending us surf we didn’t order, six structure calls close enough to smell if the wind was wrong, a bronze Jesus missing its feet in Orange County, and a stranger on a ham radio channel correcting their own typo for an audience of nobody. That’s Burbank on a Monday — sunbaked, a little on fire at the edges, mostly harmless, and somehow still capable of being sweet about it. K’oyacyi, Little Mister. Try not to burn the house down before Tuesday’s heat actually lands.
End of Line.