If life gives you clay...

Make bricks and build a house.

[Only for our aristocratic friends and our NRA buddies] Make a clay pigeon, launch it, shoot at it.

[Only for our religious friends] Have your kid make small clay birds, then tell him to clap their hands and see if the birds fly away.
Note: If the birds don't budge, your kid is not the Messiah incarnate, no matter how brilliant and amazing your offspring is.

Make a piece of art, wait, wait, wait, wait...maybe.

Make an ocarina and play.

Make a spaceship, and put tiles on. Or, well, make a model spaceship and put tiles on.

Make a pot.

Civilization works well without cars, smart phones, or TV, but without pottery, we might still be eating off the floor.

Until a few decades ago, pottery was one of the few primary means of dating early archaeological finds, so, you could say without much exaggeration: no pots, no history beyond the basics.
Just watch a few episodes of British TV show Time Team and see Phil Harding dance with a thumbnail sized piece of fired dirt, and you understand.

We will do two posts about specific pottery over the coming week but felt compelled to write about tiles first because we came across Microsoft Windows and its tiles.

The tech industry has hijacked about every other useful word in the English language, from bits (they used to go on power drills), to windows, to events, to tiles.

Oh, and service, if you recall an earlier post about that.

Please stay away from tiles, dear nerds. I have enough of a hard time explaining to some friends that Gaudi is the name of a famous Spanish (Catalan) architect although it is spelled exactly like the Bavarian dialect word for fun or amusement.

Gaudis Kacheln (Gaudi's tiles) does not mean fun with MS Windows tiles, though Windows tiles are a constant source of amusement.

Sadly, tiles are also intimately connected to places where blood flows, where guts are spilled, where life ends.

Bummer, we just ended a post on a downer.

Which runs contrary to the optimistic nature of the blogster!

So, here is the uplifting ending: go to the sister blog lostorfoundart to admire the gorgeous and functional gable tiles of an old house in Eastern France.