Consider $viewer = $this->getViewer();.

id() isn't necessary here since you aren't calling methods on the object immediately.

As above.

Slightly simpler as if (!$this->events) { ... }

Indents are a little weird here? This block should go in one level, I think.

This is probably really, like:

960 + (60 * number of hours before 8 AM we're showing)

That is, we probably do layout wrong on days with an event at, say, 2AM?

Does jsTodayEvents still need to be an object property (instead of just a local variable)?

We should move this to z-index.css and pick a more appropriate number (likely 2 or 3 or something around there).

Stray JX.log().

Stray log.

We probably don't need this anymore since we're returning a reload response.

Stray debugging.