Optical Illusion Tissue Boxes Are the Hottest Thing

Tissue boxes have traditionally been rather dull cardboard boxes, but now they’re going in a more stylish direction. Tissue boxes with a variety of subjects are the hottest thing. Take, for example, the ballerina tissue box. The box looks like a mini stage with a ballerina wearing a flowing white skirt, but if you take a closer look, the “skirt” is actually made of the tissue you pull out of the box. Its shape is randomly determined by the placement of the tissue, so you’ll likely never see the same skirt twice. Made of acrylic, it’s designed to fit most tissue boxes, and features a built-in touch-sensitive night light with LED illumination for easy use at night. This playful idea for a tissue box cover isn't the only one on the market. They follow a similar visual illusion and feature characters such as 1950s pin up girls, and even a design that shows a “magic rabbit” holding a magician’s top hat and, instead of pulling a rabbit out of the hat, you pull tissues. All of these items are available on Etsy and Amazon.

 

 

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Applebee’s Worker Praised for Sheltering 50 People as Tornado Barreled Towards Them

Aubrey McKenzie (inset), a manager at Applebee’s in Three Rivers, Mich., has been afraid of storms since she was a child. That, however, didn’t stop her from ushering her staff and guests to safety as a tornado was barreling toward the restaurant. McKenzie said it was an ordinary beautiful day, when the tornado warning went off. At the time, she was leaving for a neighboring Applebee’s when she heard everybody’s phones going off with tornado warnings. Conditions were changing by the second, and before long she could see the funnel cloud outside. Admittedly panicked, McKenzie reminded herself that she had to stay calm, and her response was quick and orderly. She led all the guests and staff into the prep kitchen where there are no windows. It was a tight squeeze, but it was their best chance of shelter. After everyone was inside, she peeked her head out one last time and saw that a man and his dog were sitting in a pickup truck outside the restaurant, as well as a boy on his phone, who seemed like he was waiting for someone. She told the man and the boy to come inside immediately. Not long after, the tornado hit. “Your ears were popping, but then you could also hear the glass shattering from the dining room. It’s exactly how you would imagine it would be standing in the middle of a tornado. Shattering, like things hitting everything. It sounded like a freight train,” said McKenzie. The brick-built Applebee’s held up, even though it took 4 days to clean up the restaurant, with glass from the broken windows and spirit bottles finding its way into every conceivable nook and cranny. New vacuums had to be bought, new carpets too, but not one single person was hurt. “I was surprised that I was able to get everybody, and be that organized in that short amount of time,” she admitted. “I’ve been called hero a lot lately and I laugh it off, but I guess I did what I felt I had to do.”

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The Scary Reason You Should Never Retrieve Your Phone If It Drops Between Airplane Seats

Imagine that you’ve treated yourself by using your frequent flyer miles to upgrade from cramped coach to a cushy business-class seat. The move made journalist Aaron Rasmussen feel like he had scored a major win. He was sitting pretty and settling into his comfortable seat with all the bells and whistles for his long-haul trip, when his phone slipped off the armrest and disappeared into the sat. He tried to reach down and grab it, but cringed when his fingers brushed up against a bunch of metal gears and moving parts that he couldn’t see. The thought of getting his fingers mangled made him yank his hand back. Although that might seem like reason enough to not attempt to retrieve a phone that slips between the seats, there’s actually an even scarier one. Any device with a lithium-ion battery (such as a cellphone, laptop, tablet, gaming system or even an electric toothbrush) that falls into a plane seat can be damaged in the seat’s internal mechanisms. If that happens, the battery could overheat and ignite. The worst-case scenario: There’s a fire mid-flight. It has to do with a cycle of ever-increasing heat. if a battery is crushed, punctured or otherwise compromised, it can increase the probability of a chain reaction known as thermal runaway. The damaged battery gets hot. That heat releases energy, which increases heat, which releases energy and increases heat … on a loop. At some point, the battery could simply ignite. So, what should you do? Don’t force it out. Instead, notify a flight attendant right away. Crew members are well-versed in the peculiarities of different seat designs and know how to access tight spaces safely. Flight attendants often handle these precarious situations by placing the compromised item into a specialized thermal containment bag.

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Ferdinand Waldo Demara: The Greatest Con Artist of All Time

Ferdinand Waldo Demara was not a genius. In fact, he dropped out of school before graduating. He wasn’t a well-known actor, astronaut, politician or hero, but he was the greatest con artist of all time. Among other things, he impersonated a doctor, professor, jail warden, and a monk. His most famous scam was when he worked as a surgeon on the battleship HMS Cayuga as Dr. Joseph Cyr. Having no medical training, he learned procedures from textbooks on the fly. Even after the Canadian Navy discovered the fraud, they refused to charge Demara. In order to avoid scandal and public scrutiny, the Canadian government chose to simply deport Demara back to the United States in 1951. A few years later, Demara took on a new identity and began working as a guard at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. After a year, one of the inmates discovered a Life magazine article about Demara and exposed him. He escaped but was apprehended two years later in North Haven, Maine. He was sentenced to six months in jail. His last con was at a hospital in Anaheim, Calif., where he worked as a chaplain. He was exposed there too, but because he became close friends with the management and one of the hospital’s owners, he was allowed to stay. He worked there until 1980, when he had both of his legs amputated due to diabetes, dying two years later of heart failure. Even though Demara had a really interesting life and never really cared about money, in the end, a con artist is still just a con artist.

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