I have probably mentioned this, but IMHO portal was invented by Terry Pratchett.

Discworld, Book 22, The Last Continent (1998)

The wizards looked at the gently rippling surface. There should have been several feet of solid wood sticking out of it.
“Well, well, well,” said the Archchancellor, going back in out of the cold air. “Do you know, I’ve never actually seen one of these?”
“Anyone remember Archchancellor Bewdley’s boots?” said the Senior Wrangler, helping himself to some cold mutton from the trolley. “He made a mistake and got one of the things opened up in the left boot. Very tricky. You can’t go walking around with one foot in another dimension.”
“Well, no…” said Ridcully, staring at the tropical scene and tapping his chin thoughtfully with the seashell.
“Can’t see what you’re treading in, for one thing,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“One opened up in one of the cellars once, all by itself,” said the Dean. “Just a round black hole. Anything you put in it just disappeared. So old Archchancellor Weatherwax had a privy built over it.”
“Very sensible idea,” said Ridcully, still looking thoughtful.
“We thought so too, until we found the other one that had opened in the attic. Turned out to be the other side of the same hole. I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture.”
“I’ve never heard of these!” said Ponder Stibbons. “The possibilities are amazing!”
“Everyone says that when they first hear about them,” said the Senior Wrangler. “But when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.”
“But if you could get one to open above another you could drop something through the bottom hole and it’d come out of the top hole and fall through the bottom hole again…It’d reach meteoritic speed and the amount of power you could generate would be—”
“That’s pretty much what happened between the attic and the cellar,” said the Dean, taking a cold chicken leg. “Thank goodness for air friction, that’s all I’ll say.”
Ponder waved his hand gingerly through the window and felt the sun’s heat.
“And no one’s ever studied them?” he said.

yes, that is all too true. can be very successful yet be oblivious to the realities around them.

- remember an interview w/Ted Turner, while he was on top in the cable world (CNN was king). when speaking about business matters; very insightful. But when the questions about current affairs came around; he gave his opinion then changed it or said IDK anytime the interview offered a counterpoint.

- in an interview w/Colin Powell, as Sec of State, when the interviewer tried to corner him on how, looking at his GPA in HS and college, he ever made it to a 4-star general? all Colin would do was smile and say (something like) "It's good to be American. It offers many great opportunities to many people." That line of questioning ending in both parties smiling and chuckling.

- had to show our valedictorian how to put air into a tire. watching them struggle was hilarious but made one empathic.

also the belief anyone can become the president of the U.S.A. is both inspiring and terrifying. (as we all know now)

****

seeing this video, and the truth of the above sentence is a reason why education should become one of the top three, if not top, priorities, and quests of this nation. paired w/a universal form of national service* should provide all citizens will the skills to perceive wtf is actually going on.

*a former military serviceman, back from Iraq, noticed that Congress has far fewer former service members in their ranks since the early '80s. he noted in the military there are many ilks of service personnel, but they all work toward one goal. they have to - or they fail. reading this, have to believe - like Bush, Sr and Clinton both agreed on - that all Americans should put in some form of national service . since it'd foster a better understanding of other Americans: how they lived, how they were raised, their beliefs, the challenges they must face...i.e. see more than what's outside your 'bubble'.

this idea and a couple of other GREAT bipartisan ideas have waned since 9/11 but it'd be a hell of a fix.

* * * * realizing have wandered off the trail * * * *

or more concisely; to your point...

a body might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but any tool can become useful.

I......
Um......
Holy fucking sheep shit. Bob, did you have a lobotomy recently? You're in rare form today. Rarely are you this ridiculous.

It's not ok to have aids (not just a gay thing you bigoted moron) and knowingly spread it to others. You go to prison for that.

It's certainly not ok to give a pregnancy to a fourteen year old....you go to prison for that.

So I agree, let's treat anti vaxers like your examples and put them in prison.

Their intentional irresponsibility makes them all collectively guilty of manslaughter hundreds of thousands of times over... and that's being generous. Really it's murder, they knew it's deadly.

So...if you realize it's in your best interest to take it, based on old data of who was most vulnerable BEFORE Delta, why the fuck are you so against it for others? Delta is different, it targets young and old. In the first two weeks of August, infections in those under 18 went up over 5%, a trend that started with the onset of Delta and continues to accelerate. Epsilon may target the young. Your ilk hesitating to get vaccinated helped create this new variant and others, so consider yourselves 100% responsible for the increase in child deaths, your stubborn ignorance has killed hundreds if not thousands of children and disabled tens it not hundreds of thousands that need not ever have been in danger. Edit: and for what?! With all your bluster, you got it anyway, but will probably continue to persuade others to not get it.

Totally agree with @StukaFox, "me, me, me, me, me, and fuck you." Is your mantra. I hope you meet up with yourself and take each other out.
Would you have been against it if Trump was still president and telling you it's safe? I bet not....you are exactly that dumb.

In this instance, you shouldn't have a free choice anymore than you have a free choice to poison your community's water supply with a poison that ONLY kills 2%+ and disables >10% (and makes most everyone sick for weeks). Refusing to vaccinate against a deadly airborne virus is like refusing to stop tossing your lawn darts straight up in the air in a crowded stadium because, to paraphrase you, "my fweedums, my wites, fuck you". Is it a certainty you're going to kill and maim people? No, but it's a high likelihood and a crime to put them in that kind of danger even if you never hit anyone, and murder if you kill some.

Republicans have decided that deadly irresponsibility should not just be their right, but their choice....but not their responsibility when it's deadly. So much for personal responsibility.

Enjoy that new underwear I sent you. Ignore that little sponge in the taint area, it's for your comfort, not just to infect you with fournier's gangrene.

Jesus Christ I'm old -- I remember watching this when it first aired. And Gary Neuman on SNL. And looking at the moon when the last astronauts were there.

What a long, strange trip it's been...

Unconvinced.
Why would they try to land on an aircraft carrier, breaking the plane every single time by scraping the wingtips off on the deck? In air refueling means it would never be required, and a total lack of stealth makes it just stupid, landing strip width makes it incredibly difficult to land a plane over 3 times the wingspan of an F16, especially one as in precise and hard to fly as a u2….and impossible to store off the deck, making the carrier useless until the U2 was removed.

On land they had chase cars that drove under the wings at landing, installing the wheels and/or keeping the tips off the ground.

Not trusting this internet source…beware unknown sources.
There’s a reason there wasn’t one shot of a successful landing, the best they had was a 3 point landing with the wing as point 3. At best this was a failed test, not a functional program.

The creator put some answers in the comments:

How the heck did i make it?

The living room of my father's place had a very strong ceiling fan, which could go in reverse. Instead of blowing air down, it would pull the air up. That would create an updraft strong enough to sustain the vortex. Next, I had a box fan and a blanket set up to redirect the air flow so it rotated around the center of the room. You can see it as the dark blue object in the back right. After the fans were turned on, I laid out an old dark red bed sheet with a small PVC pipe underneath it connected to a fog machine. The bed sheet allowed the fog to gently seep through and get pulled into the vortex, as opposed to being blasted out of the pipe. And then it was all a matter of letting the ceiling fan's updraft and the box fan's rotation mix into a 10 ft tall indoor tornado!!

There's no air in there ya buttheads...good grief

People have had this type of discussion about lots of things, like washing hands (yes even doctors before operations), smoking cigarettes, or letting excrement flow down busy streets.

Now sometimes it wasnt easy, but if civilizations eventually built sewers and aqueducts maybe we can somehow stop spewing poisonous gasses into the air in large volumes.

Its difficult to find immediate motivation to act, especially for us self entitled pricks, I totally understand. I live over 300 meters above sea-level.

Since nobody else has said it: lightning wouldn't stop if it hit something like that in mid air, it would continue on. Either the lightning hit something else in the distance instead of that ball, or this is fake. Either way, I really don't think it hit the ball.

That shoe had some serious air time.

How did the mines not explode after being dropped from the air?

And how did they land with the trigger facing up buried in the sand?

Explain please.

The first wrong was being a Nazi youth invader attacking their neighbors and trying to subjugate or eradicate them....IMO that's actually three wrongs at a minimum, but I digress.

What's the second wrong? Using POWs this way was common practice then....no Geneva convention yet banning it. Most POWs were treated exponentially worse, starved and tortured to death or used as slave labor and worked to death on dangerous projects. By comparison, these Hitler youths were coddled.

Being forced to clean up a small mine field before release is hardly on par with that....there are still allegedly POWs alive in Vietnam and elsewhere....They would jump at the chance to clear mines and be released.

And what's the alternative? Leave the mines to kill civilians? Have the victims of invasion do the dirty work of cleaning up the mess the invading Nazis left? I think forcing the invaders to clean up the mess they made is the ONLY right move, anything else is wrong....like what we do, dropping hundreds of thousands of mines on foreign soil from the air with no idea where most end up and just leaving them to disable a country for generations. That is wrong....this isn't even harsh IMO.

And now the swarms of locusts (ok, really grasshoppers) begin.

Utah farmers, already struggling with drought and extreme heat, are being plagued by grasshoppers destroying what little crops they managed to grow. Early heat caused an early hatch, leading to swarms. Many farmers abandoned their crops rather than go through the expense of spraying a crop they have no water for, allowing a bad situation to get exponentially worse. Hay may soon be in short supply along with produce.

If it's a mild winter, expect worse next year when their eggs hatch. Without improvement in the weather, colder in winter wetter in spring and cooler in summer, farmers nationwide expect next year to be far worse than this year's disastrous growing season. Nevada and Arizona are due to lose their main water source soon, and California expects more water shortages statewide as reservoirs near empty and aquifers go dry.

Sure sounds like the climatologists were correct, if anything minimizing the effects and rate of change from climate change; heat, drought, plagues, swarms, fires. They were not exaggerating them @bobknight33. These are exactly what they predicted, just a decade early, and exactly what you denied would happen. All time high local temperatures were reached worldwide in the last month including ground temperatures of 118 F in arctic Siberia and 130 F last weekend in Death Valley, the hottest atmospheric air temperature ever seen on the planet since humans existed.

But nope, climate change is a liberal hoax, they just have the entire planet lying to support it, destroying their own crops and cooking their citizens to keep the lie going. 🤦‍♂️

I hope you live long enough for your children to accept that their disastrous future was caused by you and your ilk and abandon you to the baking streets in your old age to starve and bake. You ignorant and dishonest deniers deserve worse for decimating the only planet we have. Your children will come to that conclusion, the only question is when.