Thomas Edison is the reason 'hello' is the standard telephone greeting.

You probably know that Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, much to the anger of many Tesla-lovers on the Internet. One thing he for sure didn’t invent, though, was the telephone. That one goes to Alexander Graham Bell. When the first phone call was made by Bell, his famous words were “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

There was no greeting to it, and Bell proposed using “ahoy ahoy” as the standard greeting. Ahoy stuck around until Edison suggested a simple “hello.” Obviously, it caught on. Edison is sometimes falsely credited as inventing the word “hello” itself, but variants of it had been used throughout the 19th century.

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Walmart allows RV's to park overnight, pending available space, as they are considered some of their best customers.

If someone double parking annoys you, then an RV taking up a half dozen spaces probably bothers you too. You might also have noticed that they seem to hang out around Walmarts pretty often. Well, the plain reason for this is that Walmart likes them. According to Walmart’s website, “Walmart values RV travelers and considers them among our best customers.”

It stands to reason that this is true because having a place to park the RV that also happens to have nearly every supply you need is very convenient. So if you’re ever on an RV trip and the nearest rest stop is too far away, you know where to head.

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A technique called 'circular breathing' allowed a saxophone player to hold an E-flat for over 45 minutes!

Now at last you can understand how the “epic saxaphone guy” can play that song for 10 hours in those YouTube videos. In all seriousness, there’s a technique called circular breathing that’s used by players of some wind and brass instruments to produce a continuous tone without interruption for breathing time.

Basically, it involves breathing in through the nose while still pushing air out of the mouth. This is accomplished by storing air in the cheeks. It’s used frequently for didgeridoo players as well as oboe and flute players. In 1997, someone made the world record for using circular breathing to hold a note for 45 minutes.

It was Kenny G (who today is often associated with Foster the People) who accomplished the feat. To this day, 15 years later, the Guinness Book of World Records acknowledges him as the record holder for longest musical note.

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IKEA ran the first commercial in the US featuring a gay couple. It was pulled after one showing due to bomb threats!

Usually when you hear “bomb threat,” xenophobia kind of takes control and the mind defaults to thinking of someone from outside trying to cause harm. But there’s no real high ground when it comes to countries having people angry enough to kill people over something, because those people are in every country.

IKEA had been airing a series of ads that focused on unconventional families. Not just gay couples, but single moms and the like. IKEA had some reservations about airing the ad knowing the potential negative reaction, so they slid it in at a 9:30 PM slot in New York City and Washington DC to get a feel for how warm the welcome would be.

Unfortunately the only warm feeling would be the heat of a bomb, or at least the threat of one, because there were bomb threats following that single ad. It was consequently pulled.

Regardless of your feelings on homosexuality, isn’t it a little strange that we’ve had major network shows with homosexual main characters for years but homosexuality is still taboo in advertising? Well if there’s anything important to take away from this, it’s that tolerance is the bomb.

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A 14-year-old was hired by Microsoft after he hacked into the Modern Warfare 2 servers!

Things like this actually happen pretty commonly. Governments and business alike frequently hire the people who can hack into their systems. The logic going is that if you’re smart enough to hack into a database, you’re smart enough to help better safeguard it. For one 14 year old Irish boy, a job offer at Microsoft came just this way.

He managed to break into the online servers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and start a phishing scam to get personal information from players. This particular event took place around the same time a hack attack took down the entire Playstation Network some time ago, so Microsoft was understandably eager to bolster their defenses.

The Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland revealed that Microsoft planned to work with the teenager to help develop his talent to groom him for a career.

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