Israel pilgrimage, sixth in series

Hello, everyone.

After Mass at the Church of the Transfiguration, we rode down the switchback road on the vans and re-boarded our bus. Then we rode to Capernaum.

Entering the Capernaum area. Note that there are a lot of people. This was true pretty much everywhere.

Capernaum was not an ancient Jewish city at the time, it was one of the ones that had been built up later. It's on the Sea of Galilee ("sea" in the talk of the time included any large lake, apparently) and it's really where Jesus spent a lot of His time teaching and observing.

The dark layer, of the local building stone (basalt) is from the time of Jesus. Later, the local Jewish community had funds and rebuilt their synagogue in marble or limestone which is white. (No information was provided on why they needed to rebuild their stone synagogue building.)

Close up next to the synagogue building were homes of the residents of the town. Here in front are what appear to be parts of a press (juice? olive oil? small size grape?) and possibly some stove parts, with a stone jar. Like the wall bases around them, they're carved from the dark basalt stone.

Looking across the ruins of houses toward St. Peter's house, which is sheltered by this modern church. It looks like the 60's.

It looks like the 60's inside, too. The backless benches let the light come in very well, but they're probably a bit difficult for the older worshipper. Perhaps the space is designed around sitting to view and praise-and-worship services. The carvings on the wall are of various Gospel incidents. Too late, when it was time to leave, I realized that there are also captions below the carvings.

I was disappointed that there was really no information about the ruins of the house, which are intended by the builders to be visible through the glass in the center. Sadly, present-day persons decided that the viewing glass should be obscured by a large pot of ivy. One can see around the edges of the ivy pot and it would have been informative, and possibly even edifying, if there had been information boards--possibly outside--helping the modern day visitor understand the layout of the house and if there was any specifically fishing oriented feature there.

There is so much that we take for granted these days about living that wasn't true back then, and the Gospels were written back then in that environment, assuming that everyone had the same context. We moderns need to recover the context information to understand what was happening sometimes.

This is a crop of the above photo. I didn't make a picture of the altar by itself at the time as I was disappointed in how hard it was to see. It is only today, making this crop that I realized that whoever made the mosaic was apparently a die-hard Pointillist. Images show from a distance that are impossible to make out close up. Images that, with difficulty, I made out in the green up close vanish--there are people and baskets throughout the green--but since there was almost no use of contrast to help the viewer any reference and teaching to be found there is lost. I wonder, are the people and baskets in the green the folks being fed at the miraculous feedings? Are they the people selling fish in the local market?

From a distance, I can make out Jesus in the medium-toned pink, with two-toned pink halo (next to the person's shoulder), and next to Jesus there is a chalice and some loaves. (In the pale-pink squiggle created by darker pink shapes, the chalice and loaves are dark.) These are Eucharistic symbols.

Artists need to remember a few things: (pardon the shouting here) YOU AREN'T GOING TO BE THERE TO EXPLAIN ALL THE COOL THINGS ABOUT YOUR WORK. The words on the page, the paint on the canvas, the tiles in the grout must stand on their own. Tour-de-force technical brilliance isn't the point of art. Communication is. And if you can't get your heart and mind around the purpose of the art--say, you're a passionate atheist considering a commission for church art--you should just do a different project. The artist's true attitude toward his viewer/reader and subject will surely come out and diminish the quality of the art if it (the attitude) is inconsistent with the purpose and placing of the piece.

About those Windows 10 updates again...

Hello, everyone.

A little while ago (like a week or three) Microsoft sent around a new cumulative update to Windows 10. Do they tell you they're going to break things with it? No-o-o-o. They just do it. And honestly if they were doing their jobs right they'd make sure that they weren't re-breaking things that they already broke once. (Or notify people, and maybe also software companies whose products are being trashed.)  Like Adobe Photoshop Elements. Which is unable to save a file.

The last time The Windows update broke Photoshop Elements, there was a lot of fussing on the internet about this stuff. A few weeks later, there was a sudden update to Adobe Photoshop Elements. And, lo and behold, the save function was working again.

Until this Windows update. Now it thinks there is insufficient RAM to save a picture. Again.

Really people? 😡

Anyway, I wanted to share a picture of a video game machine we encountered while walking after we left Tapia de Casariego. It was at snack time, and while we were sitting and having our cafe leche or whatever (I forget now) we saw this machine across the tiny bar.

The theme of the computer-pinball machine is "F-B-I" and the screen has a rotating series of silly pictures in the theme.

It was a surprise to see a game machine on this theme in Spain, on the other side of the world from where anyone would even think about that agency. But it's a small world and we never know what we will discover on the Camino.

Lights on the Frangipane

Hello, everyone.

This is the second morning of the cold phase of this front. Today--yay!--the sun is out. It will warm up some today.

There wasn't a photo available the other day to show what we did with the frangipane pot. I wanted to put one up.

The leaves were burned with the last front, and it only got down to the upper 40's. We hope to keep it from leafing out anew before the warm season returns in about 6 weeks--which is tomato planting time in South Texas.

In the last post, the glowing tomatoes had lights under their sheets, rather like this, except that those Christmas light strings were the small incandescent bulbs. The strings of small bulbs are longer and can be stacked up a little bit more on one plug compared to the larger bulbs.

And these days the big thing is the LED Christmas light strings which are no good at all for freeze protection. (But they are brighter.) The only heat those strings put out is at the little round transformer units scattered here and there along the wire.

A mildly off-topic rant here: the noisy, hectoring Cool People are all excited about compelling everybody on planet Earth to use their, preferred, LED bulbs for everything. And if not those, which are expensive, then they want us all to use their delicate, mercury-containing swirly flourescents in our lamps and round ceiling fixtures.  Everybody is not the same, people! Not everyone is in a year-round warm climate. Many, many people live in places where the "waste" heat from an incandescent light bulb is helping to heat the house in the winter. And some of those cold seasons are long. Furthermore, the swirly bulbs come with completely unworkable suggestions for disposal. Who is going to be able to find an approved hazardous disposal site for the broken glass after one of those gets dropped? Are the Cool People going to come around every couple of days and inquire whether they can help clean up broken glass and whatnot? I doubt it. People generally have a much better idea of what will work in their own, personal, local situation than some complaining person with an agenda that lives in another part of the country, or the world, in a different kind of building and situation. (End rant. Sorry about that. A little!)