Batty religions; Germany in the EU; Greece in the EU?; Master raster; & George Borrow bettered.

The Sunday Morning Debate on BBC TV scaled new heights this week when the final item was: "Have beings from other planets guided our religions?". First up was a woman - a 'spiritist' - who said she was a Christian but also believed that earth and all other planets are peopled by spirits, as part of a 'universal society of spirits'. Invisible, of course. But she was quite sane compared to the chap from the Aetherius Society who asserted that all religious leaders had come here from specific planets. He cited Venus for Jesus but wasn't sure about Mohamed. Fascinatingly, he added that, if a mission to Venus were to land tomorrow, the crew wouldn't be able to see the Venutians. They're as invisible as the spirits, apparently. Anyway, here's a Wiki intro to these nutters:- The Aetherius Society is a millenarian, New Age, UFO religion. It was founded by George King in the mid-1950s as the result of what King claimed were contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences, whom he referred to as “Cosmic Masters”. Regarded as firmly based in Theosophy, the Aetherius Society combines UFO claims, yoga, and ideas from various world religions, notably Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. And here's their web page. This will have to do you until I get roun& d to inventing my own (profitable) religion.

A nice comment from the latest edition of Private Eye on the status of Germany in the EU . . .

More seriously, the question still lingers as to what is going to happen in respect of Greece. No one knows, of course, but there's some sort of key meeting tomorrow. Meanwhile, the words being bandied about include hardball, brinkmanship, Balkans and Russia. It looks like things are getting serious.

I thought yesterday I'd stumbled upon an egregious typing error when trying to find a detailed map of the Salamanca area. As in:- This means that you can download both 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 sheets for your own use as raster files. I thought this was a mistake for 'master files' but then noticed 'raster' was used in Spanish as well. It turns out to be: A rectangular pattern of parallel scanning lines followed by the electron beam on a television screen or computer monitor.

Finally . . . If you've any interest in Spanish history and culture, then you really should know a bit about George Borrow - an English eccentric who came here to sell Protestant(!) Bibles in the 1830s and then wrote a fascinating book about his travels and experiences. In parts, it may be quite accurate. Anyway, it's entitled, naturally enough, The Bible in Spain and can be downloaded or read online as a free ebook. Or, better still, you can access here a version which has been heroically annotated by my good friend Peter Missler. One thing I can assure you of is that Peter's accuracy will be a great deal higher than Borrow's. Although Peter is a very close friend of that patronising, semi-British bore, Alfie Mittington, I nonetheless feel he merits this recommendation. Especially as the footnotes are quite fascinating.