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When my wife and I heard the news that American Science & Surplus launched a GoFundMe to help raise operating costs to move into a new warehouse, citing slumping sales since the COVID-19 pandemic punctuated by a huge drop-off in the last year, we began to look around our house and try to identify what bits of our home décor came from the very quirky, very geeky retail shop at 6901 W. Oklahoma Ave. The light-up moon atop our entertainment center? Yep. The kitchen measurement chart magnet on our fridge? Obviously. (Forty-eight teaspoons to a cup!) The Archie McPhee tiny hand, and the tiny hand for tiny hands, mounted in one of our kitchen plants? Oh yes. And my wife reminded me that we have a book about East Germany we bought there, because…book about East Germany. But in reality, there are enough weird novelty items in our house that it’s become difficult to tell what came from AS&S and what hasn’t.
That seamless integration of straight up weird shit from the Weird Shit Store is a microcosm of American Science & Surplus’ presence in Milwaukee proper: technically, it hasn’t been in Milwaukee since the city’s start, but it has, hasn’t it? (There are two locations in Illinois, as well.) I couldn’t tell you when I first became aware of AS&S, but it was some time before I moved to Milwaukee in the summer of 2002. I moved to this city for a number of reasons—my band was relocating, along with lots of other Green Bay music scene mainstays after the closure of the Concert Cafe. I was dating someone here, and the Fox Valley had started to feel smaller than what I wanted in a stomping ground. But knowing that there was a place in town that sold medical posters, novelty toys, graduated cylinders, and enough spare circuits and wires to build your own protocol droid was certainly one of many selling points that convinced me that Milwaukee could be my home. Hell, had I lived here in my teen years, I would have begged and pleaded with my parents to let me get a job there, assuming that I was cool enough to get hired. You can save your uber-hip local musicians and sports heroes; as far as I’m concerned, whatever nerdy purple-haired teenage comedian labeled the back scratchers with a Ted Nugent pun is the coolest kid in town.
I confess that when I read how soaring shipping costs were causing financial hardship for the store, I realized I forgot that there’s even an American Science & Surplus website, let alone one that takes orders. I never visit it, because, well, the store’s right there. Stepping through what feels like the entryway to an old grocery store or five and dime (albeit one with a flyer taped to the wall for a seminar on the dangers of AI), immersing oneself in the brick and mortar is an instant adventure. Record shops typically have two types of customers: those looking for a specific LP and others who show up with no particular goals in mind, just hoping to discover something they didn’t realize they needed until it’s right in front of them. AS&S is built for discovery, tailored to the shopper who wanders in having absolutely no idea what they’ll find until they find it. It sounds cliché at this point in the ongoing Death of Retail, but the hypnotic aimlessness of getting lost in a resale or surplus shop is fading, and that’s a drag, because anyone who has been there will tell you that getting lost in AS&S totally rules.
In 2006 my band was asked to play the South Shore Frolics parade (RIP, South Shore Frolics) on the Rushmor Records float, and were instructed to dress like space aliens. Where Rushmor made a mistake was in not telling us what kind of space aliens to dress like—hey, we could put any kind of nonsensically horrific outfit together and say we’re “aliens!” So to AS&S we went, where we picked up some white lab coats to complement the clear face masks and blue/green face paint we bought from Bartz’s Party Store. We looked horrifying. I’m pretty sure we scared, even scarred, some kids. We thank American Science & Surplus for the opportunity.
Not long after, I bought my first telescope since high school from them—one that I years later broke out during COVID lockdown to reignite my love of astronomy. Speaking of which, the eclipse watching party in the parking lot April of last year was an absolute hoot, with a line out the door to buy eclipse glasses while WMSE blasted cosmic tunes from their tent.
Every year, my wife and I do a run to the store to make a Christmas sweep, picking up random novelty toys for the niblings (you haven’t lived until you give your nephew a whoopie cushion from AS&S that promptly lasts for about five inflations before he accidentally pops it) and then hopping over to Lost World of Wonders to check out the trade paperbacks and Funko Pops. (Hop in to Albella Bargain Store for some vintage toys, and you’ve hit the nerd trifecta.) I am fairly sure that most every noise artist in the city has probably assembled a homemade tone generator from spare parts from this place, and I’m certain that family after family has stories of similar random treasure hunts. Ask my wife about her plastic trout. It’s small, it’s plastic, it’s a trout. It’s on her desk at work. No, it doesn’t do anything—it’s a trout.
Look, it’s always a little uncomfortable to see a capitalist business of any kind asking for money. Many of us might see a retail outfit post a fundraiser and react: “If they need extra help, they must not be that successful of a business, right?” But let’s be real—shit’s been really weird since COVID, hasn’t it? Retail of all kinds is floundering, and we all know the culprits: inflation, online retail giants and their accursed free shipping and loss leaders. And some people just still don’t feel comfortable in crowded stores. But small businesses aren’t a homogenous mash of soulless department stores or interchangeable Dollar Trees. Losing American Science & Surplus would actually alter Milwaukee’s identity, make it considerably less weird. More beige. Who needs more beige?
Yesterday, I stopped by the shop to snap some photos for this piece, and poke around to see what might call to me. Sure enough, I ended up leaving with a USB clip-on fan to mount on my mic stand for summertime drumming, some tree-shaped LED table light fixtures to add to the indirect lighting in the practice space, and a capybara finger puppet which now lives with the owl and rat finger puppets I got at Green Bay UFO Museum Gift Shop and Records (the Concert Cafe may be dead, but Weird Green Bay lives on).
As I wandered the aisles, I noticed a guy maybe eight years my junior exploring with two kids that looked to be around 7 or 8. I kept hearing them exclaim “that’s so cool!” every time some new curiosity caught their eyes. As of this writing, the GoFundMe is just shy of $82,000 out of a goal of $125,000. I trust those kids and I are going to continue to be wowed by cool, wacky shit from the Cool Wacky Shit Store for years to come.
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The US Senate voted today to strip California of its authority to enact state limits on tailpipe pollution that are tougher than national standards.
Opponents called it an illegal move by Republican lawmakers that flies in the face of Senate rules and norms.
Senate Republicans went forward with the vote today anyway, revoking waivers that allow California to pursue its climate goals and improve air quality by reducing emissions from cars and trucks.
Opponents say it’s an illegal move
“This is the easy way to do what the fossil fuel industry wants,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the Senate floor during deliberations that ended past 1:00AM ET. “They had this quick and dirty, sneaky maneuver that they could pull off so they didn’t have to negotiate, they didn’t have to legislate, and they didn’t have to use regulatory process.”
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has granted California waivers to set its own rules for car and truck emissions since the Clean Air Act was adopted in 1970. The standards the state sets for vehicle manufacturers can influence the entire industry because California is one of the biggest car markets in the world. Seventeen states and Washington, DC have also adopted all or part of California’s vehicle emission regulations.
The EPA had previously issued waivers to California approving its plans to require an increasing number of medium and heavy-duty vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission, and all passenger vehicles sold to be zero-emission by 2035. Taken together, the resolutions passed today attempt to hobble one of the most ambitious plans to tackle climate change in the nation by rescinding those approvals. A third resolution also revokes a waiver the EPA had granted California to limit nitrogen oxide pollution from vehicles. House Republicans passed the measures a few weeks ago.
“California has used its waiver authority to push its extreme climate policies on the rest of the country,” Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WV) said in closing remarks on the Senate floor last night.
Environmental advocates, meanwhile, argue that GOP lawmakers attacked the state’s rights. “If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it – but federal lawmakers shouldn’t be intervening to block states from providing cleaner air and a healthier environment,” Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a press statement today.
Both Senate and House Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to revoke the waivers. The CRA allows Congress to overturn certain new rules with a simple majority vote and avoid a filibuster by the opposing party. But the Senate parliamentarian and Government Accountability Office — nonpartisan watchdogs — have previously found that the waivers aren’t considered recent rules within the parameters of the CRA.
The vote today sends the CRA resolutions to President Donald Trump to sign. Trump unsuccessfully tried to take away California’s authority to set its own tailpipe standards during his first term in office.
Auto trade groups have opposed California’s plans to require more EV sales. “Disapproval of the rules is essential to ensuring a unified national vehicle marketplace that promotes continued progress on fuel economy while safeguarding economic growth and consumer interests,” Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce said in a letter to senators last week.
This morning, Distributed Denial of Secrets published 410 GB of data hacked from TeleMessage, the Israeli firm that makes modified versions of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat that centrally archive messages. Because the data is sensitive and full of PII, DDoSecrets is only sharing it with journalists and researchers.
There's a lot of background, so here's a quick timeline of events with relevant links:
- March: Then-national security advisor Mike Waltz invited a journalist into a Signal group where they planned war crimes. This led to Congressional hearings about Trump officials using Signal groups to discuss classified information.
- May 1: Waltz (the day he was demoted from position of national security advisor) was photographed using TM SGNL, a modified version of Signal made by TeleMessage. He had texts up with Tusli Gabbard, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio.
- May 3: I published the source code of the TM SGNL to GitHub.
- May 4: TeleMessage got hacked, which I reported in 404 Media with Joseph Cox.
- May 5: TeleMessage got hacked again by someone else, as NBC News reported.
- May 6: I published analysis of the TM SGNL source code, along with some of the hacked data, that prove the TeleMessage lied about its products supporting end-to-end encryption.
- May 18: I published details about the TeleMessage server's vulnerability in WIRED. TLDR: if anyone on the internet loaded the URL archive.telemessage.com/management/heapdump, they would download a Java heap dump from TeleMessage's archive server, containing plaintext chat logs, among other things.
Now, DDoSecrets has published 410 GB of these TeleMessage heap dumps. Here's the DDoSecrets description of the release:
Thousands of heap dumps taken May 4, 2025 from TeleMessage, which produces software used to archive encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp. The service came to public notice in 2025 when it was reported that former national security adviser Mike Waltz used TeleMessage while communicating with members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. TeleMessage has been used by the federal government since at least February 2023.Some of the archived data includes plaintext messages while other portions only include metadata, including sender and recipient information, timestamps, and group names. To facilitate research, Distributed Denial of Secrets has extracted the text from the original heap dumps.
It seems that the SignalGate saga of staggering incompetence is not yet complete. I'm digging into this data right now. It's bonkers.
Note: I'm a member of the DDoSecrets collective. If you can, donate! DDoSecrets operates on a shoestring budget and does incredibly impactful work.
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For commuters prone to motion sickness, using a laptop on a train is perhaps do-able; trains don't make sharp turns and sudden stops. But trying to work on a bus or in a car is likely difficult.
Apple has designed a fascinating feature that aims to prevent motion sickness while using their laptops, iPads or iPhones. Called Vehicle Motion Cues, the feature places a bunch of dots across your screen:
These dots move as if they are part of the scenery outside the vehicle. In other words, when the vehicle you're riding in turns to the left, the dots move to the right. As the vehicle accelerates, the dots move downwards. Like this:
I'm super curious to see how well this works. As a remote worker myself, I have no opportunity to commute, but reviews should come out later this year. Apple plans to roll the feature out in their forthcoming Mac OS and iOS updates.
