I always get this joke confused with the one where there's the hole in the wall and you get a free BJ except on tuesday. So I guess what I'm saying is step right up! You'll either get your question answered for free or, er, something else.

Office hours are about 10am - 6:30pm EST. So you can expect most of my replies to be during those times.

From the Get to Know a Pogger thread:

Obv #2 requires a story but you'll probably have to wait tomorrow for me to tell you more about it.

Cliff notes: I met my wife online when I was 17. She was 47. When I graduated from High School I moved across the country from MD to WA, we ended up moving to MT, where we live now. We're a little weird, but it's the happy weird afaik. I am 27 now and we have been married 9.5 years.

Other topics:

- I work as a computer programmer for a company that sells business software. It's pretty cool.

- I am interested in philosophy, science, and spirituality. Also politics to a certain extent, but I am not particularly dogmatic about that topic. I did volunteer as a precinct captain for the Obama campaign and am a liberal communist pansy, for what that's worth.

- My wife and I are currently in the process of joining the Eastern Orthodox church (Orthodox Church in America). I have also spent a fair amount of time reading about judaism, buddhism, hinduism, and I know a lot of people into wacky new age spiritual teachings. Feel free to ask me about any of it.

- I like poker, but I've never played for significant stakes and probably have nothing interesting to say about it.

- I have played a lot of werewolf games on this site. I'm not that good at it really.

- Before poker I liked to play chess but chess is hard. At my best I was about 1600 USCF. I still play a correspondence game here or there from time to time.

OK shoot. Apologies in advance for the self-indulgence and all that. :P

.............

I can't get past the 30 Year age difference

I will ask you something once I get over the shock

I'm going to refrain from asking questions, and hope questions about our childhood are few and far between, because frankly I was a pretty awful older brother to you growing up. I'm sorry for all of that, by the way.

But I have to say, you and your wife are easily in the top five happiest couples I've ever met, and no matter how many jokes I may crack, I think that's awesome.

I think you're too hard on yourself.

O so you 2 are brothers

learn something new every day

Eh, I don't want to derail the thread any further.

Remember the time you were using the milk jug as a bong and I came in your room and wound up getting a contact buzz? That was pretty damn funny.

Oh, and the time you were grounded during winter and jumped out your second-story bedroom window and took off. Dad gets home and asks, "Why is Matt's window open and the curtain blowing out?" He had to pick your door lock to get in and find out you'd snuck out, that was hilarious.

After reading about all kinds of different religions what made you choose Eastern Orthodox?

IN Q&A FORMAT

Q: Do you remember that time...

A: YES, YES I DO.

Now my question about it is how come my friends called that a "gravity" bong. I think more properly it's like a vacuum bong or a forced air pressure bong.

Knowing your friends back then, they didn't know what a vacuum was. I'm impressed they knew what gravity was.

Somewhat briefly, it's a combination of a couple of things

1) I find the liturgical practice of the eastern church extremely fulfilling and beautiful and meaningful.

2) The philosophical underpinnings and the focus of the teachings of the church are more in line with my understanding of Christianity than any of the western churches I've known. The essential difference is that the eastern church emphasizes the goal of the Christian life as a real experience of Union with God, which they call theosis in greek. (They love themselves some greek in the orthodox church)

I think the influences of scholasticism, the age of reason, and materialism in western thought has caused western churches to forget about the mystical and other-worldly parts of Christian teaching, and focus instead either on social justice (which is a good thing to be sure), or in some of the protestant evangelical churches to view salvation as this kind of purely metaphysical question about "are you saved" without any regard for the idea that one can have an actual experience of God. Or to the extent that the western churches I've attended look for an experience (for example pentacostals or charismatics) I've found that the understanding of that experience, the cultivation of it and philosophy behind it, is deeper and richer in the orthodox church.

before reading anything, the title of this thread would be a great children's book title

are you going to dump ure wife when ure 50 and she is 80?

I considered going with "The Well Named Cylindrical Hole in the Ground From Which Water May Be Pumped"

This Well is Well Named.

no but good question

What is the key to a happy marriage? (mine's happy, I'm just curious as to your thoughts)

so it seems like you went from meeting online to being married 1 to 1.5 years later. When was the first time you met offline? did you move across the country in order to meet her? more details about that back story plz

Dont you want to have kids?
What do you do for a living ?

What is your opinion on Hitler?

LOL the Hitler question never gets old.

are the orthodox liturgical practices themselves conducive to God Realization or do they fulfill a different need? i suspect they fulfill an aesthetic need (a deep need in all of us), and if so my question would be threefold (trinitarian?)

A) what specific practices do they encourage or you perform that lead to God Realization?

B) what is the Nature of God?

C) by what mechanism does this Nature traffic with the nature of man?

easy questions I know, I figure start with softballs

It's to well threads what KITT from Knight Rider is to ... wow I'm blanking what those puzzles are called ... geez ... and I'm sober, scary.

I saw that movie: Harold and Maude.

You're a smart guy. How can you believe any of that stuff?

You're one of my favorite players by far.

Let's play another game. I want revenge.

Okay, I've been thinking about religion a bit more. This is the wild idea that I've been trying to come to grips with, let me know your thoughts on this thought process. We can describe the macroscopic world very accurately and precisely. One limiting factor to predicting complex systems is computing power. What if at a moment after the big bang when the universe fit our macroscopic world we had a large enough computer (somewhere, another dimension, alternate universe, etc) that could take in all the variables? What if that computer was sufficiently large enough to predict the next second, two, three, etc? What if it was big enough to predict all of eternity? Would his contradict the notion of free-will? What if we called this computer God?

Just some ramblings that I haven't fully thought about. Also, this neglects the quantum world.