The Brief

When he was looking for ‘80s tech inspiration and equipment for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, special effects designer Shane Dzicek knew exactly where to go: Apex Surplus, a scrap metal recycling and industrial surplus business in Sun Valley.

“They're well known in the industry for being a place to rent a lot of hard-to-find electronics,” Dzicek said. “Imagine walking into a shop that would be in the world of Harry Potter, and there's just racks that go to the ceiling with everything that you can think of … military and airplane supplies to electronics … vintage microphones and knife switches.”

In addition to various knobs that he repurposed for the show, Dzicek also found an FM signal generator from the ‘80s, which served as a model for a decibel-reading device used by the character Steve Harrington, as seen in the teaser trailer:

Dzicek isn’t the only special effects designer who’s walked the halls of Apex Surplus. The shop’s co-owner, Adam Isaacs, estimates their credits span 5,000 different productions, including sci-fi classics like Back to the Future, Mad Max, Star Wars, Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A hallway at Apex Surplus.

(

Courtesy Apex Surplus

)

So how did a nearly 70-year-old recycling business become a go-to destination for Hollywood designers?

The origins: A Holocaust survivor meets the SoCal aerospace industry 

Apex Surplus is a third-generation family-owned business, first opened in 1958 by husband and wife Bill and Charlotte Slater.

Bill Slater was a Holocaust survivor who fled Austria in the 1940s and served in the U.S. army during World War II. After the war, he moved to Southern California, which was at the height of the aerospace industry boom.

With the space race raging, aerospace companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Bendix Company were building at a rapid rate, with lots of materials left over. Slater decided to leverage his military connections and open an aerospace liquidation business and surplus front.

Bill Slater standing in Apex Surplus in the 1960s.

(

Courtesy Apex Surplus

)

“ My grandpa would drive around with a semi-truck in the ‘60s and ‘70s and essentially recycle all of their old scrap metal,” according to Isaacs, who said subsidiaries of the aerospace hub in San Fernando Valley would then come to Apex to shop for secondary parts.

As Apex’s inventory grew in the 1960s, Isaacs said the business expanded and started catching the eye of set decorators and production designers in the TV and film industry.

Apex today: From oddball artist haven to film prop shop

After Bill and Charlotte Slater’s death, Apex was passed down to their children, Melissa and Don Slater.

Melissa now co-owns Apex Surplus with her son, Adam Isaacs, who said customers today range from folks outside the film industry, like electricians, plumbers, sculptors and artists, to set and production designers who work on films — anyone with a practical, aesthetic or historical interest in vintage or obsolete electronics.

Outdoor yard of Apex Surplus.

(

Courtesy Apex Surplus

)

Isaacs said, at heart, Apex still is a scrap metal, electronics and aerospace recycling and surplus business, though its also has embraced its role as a film prop and rental house.

More recently, its products have been featured in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 13 Reasons Why, A.P. Bio and Avatar. 

“Our close proximity to Hollywood has allowed us to open up this prop division and work with a lot of talented people,” Isaacs said. “There's so much creativity and artistry being produced in L.A. … We're very fortunate that we were able to reinvent ourselves as a production hub.”

Check out LAist host Julia Paskin's interview with Stranger Things special effects designer Shane Dzicek here:

About 250 miles above the Earth, NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will enjoy an off-duty day for Thanksgiving, along with a group meal that features some celebratory foods.

"This is my second Thanksgiving in space, so I highly recommend it," said Mike Fincke, in a video message beamed down from the outpost.

This fall, NASA included a "Holiday Bulk Overwrapped Bag," or BOB, on a resupply mission that went up to the station. The bag contained festive items like clams, oysters, crab meat, quail, and smoked salmon.

"Our ground teams and the food lab at NASA have taken such great care of us," said Zena Cardman, who noted that they'll also have traditional fare like turkey and mashed potatoes, all packaged up in ways that won't cause a mess in microgravity. "We've even got some lobster, which is amazing. So I think it's going to be a really, really delicious meal."

Fincke displayed a can of cranberry sauce, which happened to come from the Russian space agency.

"It's kind of neat to have that up here because that's one of my favorite parts," he said. "I'm going to miss my family, of course. But I'm up here with my space family and it's really awesome."

Cardman and Fincke, along with fellow NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, will share their holiday meal with three Russian cosmonauts and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui.

"We don't have Thanksgiving in Japan, but here, on ISS, everybody respects each other's culture," said Yui, who added that he was looking forward to the dinner.

And if all goes as planned, more guests will arrive in time for the meal, because a Soyuz rocket with three new crew members for the station, including NASA astronaut Chris Williams, is scheduled to blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:27 am Eastern time on Thursday.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Fall in Southern California can bring on warm feelings about holidays, pumpkin spice or — for fans of Big Bear’s famous bald eagles — nesting season.

Jackie and Shadow, the feathered couple that star in a popular YouTube livestream focused on their nest overlooking Big Bear Lake, are preparing to potentially welcome new eggs — and chicks — in the coming months.

Jackie usually lays eggs in January. She laid three eggs in each of the past two seasons. But the eggs could come as late as March, as seen in 2019, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that manages the livestream.

Sandy Steers, executive director of the organization, encouraged eager viewers not to have expectations from nature — Jackie and Shadow know when the time is right, she said.

“Every year is different,” Steers told LAist. “You just have to watch and see what they choose.”

Preparing for new life in the nest

The nest is a bit of a mess lately, Steers said, but the bald eagle duo has been fixing it up to mark the beginning of nesting season.

Jackie and Shadow have been bringing in fresh sticks to furnish the nest, which is about 5.5 feet wide and 6 feet deep toward the top of a Jeffrey pine tree. Friends of Big Bear Valley called it the couples' "nestorations."

The eagles even broke their daily stick record last Saturday, stopping by with at least 28 sticks (Jackie with 15, Shadow with 13), according to Friends of Big Bear Valley records.

The previous single-day record was 25. There may have been more last Saturday, but eagle watchers aren't sure because the livestream cameras, which are usually on around the clock, were on for only about four hours.

Recent livestream interruptions

The pair of wildlife cameras run off a 24-volt solar system that recharges during the day, but recent stretches of heavy cloud cover and snowy solar panels have caused issues and intermittent outages.

“The batteries got completely run down,” Steers said. “So as soon as they would click back on, it wouldn't take very long before they ran down again.”

Friends of Big Bear Valley has been taking both cameras offline overnight to conserve power, but the organization is hopeful a few sunny days in the forecast will get the batteries, and livestreams, back up and running again normally.

What to expect in the coming months

Jackie and Shadow are expected to continue to bring sticks throughout nesting season before they start "flirting" with each other, as Steers calls it.

“They start … getting more interested in each other and bumping into each other in the nest,” she said. “Jackie is usually the one to flirt the most, and Shadow says, ‘I don't know if I'm ready for that yet.’”

The duo typically starts mating toward the end of the year on perch trees near the nest and away from the cameras (maybe the eagles want some privacy too?).

Then, the wait is on.

Jackie will start to show certain behaviors when an egg is incoming, including lingering on the nest longer, Steers said. She will have contractions before laying the first egg and potentially one or two more in the days after.

During the most recent season, Jackie laid the first egg Jan. 22, the second Jan. 25 and the third Jan. 28 as thousands of fans watched online. In 2024, she laid the first egg Jan. 25, the second Jan. 28 and the third Jan. 31.

Jackie and Shadow's three chicks during the hatching process in March 2025.

(

Friends of Big Bear Valley

/

YouTube

)

Jackie and Shadow's three chicks on March 7, 2025. One of the chicks later died, while Sunny and Gizmo successfully fledged a few months later.

(

Friends of Big Bear Valley

/

YouTube

)

Each season is a bit different for Big Bear’s bald eagles, and Steers said there aren’t standard markers people can depend on for hints at the egg-laying timeline.

But Steers said she wouldn’t be surprised if eggs arrive a bit later than usual this upcoming season, partly because of the weather.

It was unseasonably hot in Big Bear Valley this fall compared to previous years, and Jackie and Shadow usually respond to cooler winter weather before they get serious about nesting season, according to the organization.

The past season also was the first time the couple successfully raised two bald eagle chicks instead of one. Sunny and Gizmo fledged — meaning flew away from the nest for the first time — earlier this year.

“I'm sure it was a lot more work than with just one,” Steers said. “So I think that had something to do with them needing a longer break.”

Expect a quintessential fall forecast for Thanksgiving. It's going to be mostly cloudy with similar temperatures to yesterday, just a few degrees cooler here and there. The breezy Santa Ana winds should die down by the afternoon.

Coastal communities will see temperatures in the mid-70s, up to 80 degrees for the inland coast and downtown L.A.

Daytime highs in the valleys will range from the mid-70s to the low 80s, with the warmest areas in the western San Fernando Valley reaching up to 82 degrees.

The Inland Empire and Coachella Valley will see similar temps between 75 to 80 degrees. Meanwhile in the Antelope Valley, cooler weather will continue with highs from 58 to 65 degrees.

In the English language, the turkey gets kind of a tough break.

Talking turkey requires serious honesty and speaking harsh truths. Going cold turkey is, often, an onerous way of quitting something completely and suddenly. Being a turkey is a rude zinger thrown at movie and theatrical flops, as well as unpleasant, failure-prone people.

Yet, in the culinary world, the turkey looms large, particularly during November. This year, Americans are expected to eat about 30 million of them on Thanksgiving Day, according to the National Turkey Federation. It's a fitting legacy for a bird that's been a fixture of holiday meals ever since it was first brought across the Atlantic to Europe by colonists.

But for all its cultural ubiquity, much of the turkey's early history is shrouded in uncertainty, historians and etymologists say. That's particularly true of how the bird got its name.

"'Turkey' is a very confusing, confusing name," says Anatoly Liberman, a linguist and etymologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

So in this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we trace the origins of that confusing name — all the way back to pre-Columbian Mexico.

A case of mistaken identity

The species of Thanksgiving turkey that we know today, Meleagris gallopavo, was domesticated in the Americas centuries before the arrival of Europeans, according to food historian Andrew F. Smith's book The Turkey: An American Story. They were found in what's now Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, though the exact details of who domesticated the birds and when aren't quite clear, Smith writes. And, thanks to fairly shoddy record-keeping, it also isn't quite clear which European explorers can be credited with taking turkeys back home with them.

But by the 1520s, the birds were being raised in Spain and served on the dinner tables of the upper-class, Smith writes. Over the decades, farmers across the continent began to raise them, too.

From there, though, the American bird became a victim of mistaken identity, according to lexicographer Erin McKean. Prior to Meleagris gallopavo's arrival, the Europeans already had a bird they called the turkey: the African guinea fowl. The two game birds look similar and were ending up on people's dinner tables in basically the same way, McKean says.

A guinea fowl is seen in January 2020 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

(

Warren Little

/

Getty Images

)

"I bet they look a lot more similar when they're denuded of their feathers, roasted and on a plate," she says.

As a result, Meleagris gallopavo got stuck with the name "turkey," too.

But the American turkeys began to eclipse the popularity of their African doppelgangers, Smith writes. And they began showing up in historical documents; in 1550s Venice, for example, they were subject to sumptuary laws, which governed which members of society had access to particular luxuries, McKean says.

"So only certain people were allowed to eat turkey at that point," she says.

One thing that's not clear in the historical documents, though, is how the term "turkey" came to apply to guinea fowls in the first place. Smith writes that Europeans often added the word "turkey" onto items that were foreign and strange, like "turkey corn" from the Americas. McKean says that the name is thought to have come from the guinea fowl being brought by traders into Europe through the Turkish region.

But the word's origin isn't settled fact, she says. "I'm not sure we're ever going to know."

For his part, Liberman says that it's a myth that the bird has anything to do with the country of Turkey.

"The Europeans knew nothing about [the turkey's] origin and invented all kinds of names. They were not sure where the bird came from and ascribed its origin to all kinds of foreign lands," he says.

In that sense, the bird is in good company: Liberman says that the origins of most bird names are mysterious. "Some are entirely fanciful, and some are the product of confusion," he says.

Crowds buying their Christmas turkeys at the Caledonian Market, London.

(

John Warwick Brooke

/

Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

)

Back to the Americas, and into the English lexicon

Over the decades, the English grew particularly fond of turkeys, which became a central part of celebrations like Christmas, Smith writes in The Turkey. So when English colonists came to North America and created settlements like Jamestown in the early 17th century, they brought their beloved domesticated turkeys along with them.

The rest is history. Over the next two centuries, colonists' celebrations of thanksgiving for good harvests and military victories became tradition, Smith writes. And by the time President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be a national holiday in 1863, turkeys were a mainstay of those meals.

Ever since, the turkey has remained on Thanksgiving tables — and in our colloquialisms, though they've continued to evolve.

Take "cold turkey," for example. Now, the phrase is often associated with quitting an addiction — but that wasn't the case when the first uses of the idiom started popping up in the late 19th century, according to Dave Wilton, the editor of WordOrigins.org. It simply meant that something was done quickly, he says, in reference to the fact that cold turkey is a dish that requires no preparation.

The meaning of "talking turkey" has also evolved, he says, from being "social" and " agreeable" in the early 19th century to talking plainly and frankly around the beginning of the 20th.

Calling someone a "turkey" as an insult comes from theatrical slang, he says. Starting in the late 1800s, second-rate thespians were deemed "turkey actors." It's also come to describe box office failures.

Why all the negativity? McKean has a theory: "It's an ugly bird that struts like a peacock without the beautiful feathers to justify showing off." (Ouch.)

But it's a word that has had staying power, despite the fact that it's likely a misnomer in the first place.

"One thing we can't lose sight of is that turkey is pretty much a fun word to say," McKean says.

At the very least, it's catchier than Meleagris gallopavo.

Copyright 2025 NPR