clay disk

Trap shooters are deadly snipers who can shatter a clay disk four inches in diameter as it is flying 75 miles an hour.

I’ve watched the video half a dozen times now, and with each viewing I’m nearly overcome by some new intricacy: the cleverly perforated clay disk that becomes the floor of the kiln, suspending the leather-hard tiles neatly above the fire; the small tabs that allow the tiles to be hooked onto the roof beams, so they don’t slide out of place.

In 1908 a remarkable discovery was made by the Italian Mission at Phaestus of a clay disk with imprinted hieroglyphic characters belonging to a non-Cretan system and probably from W. Anatolia.

Among the Huichol Indians,4 if the people fear a drought from the extreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk, and on one side of it they paint the “face” of Father Sun, a circular space surrounded by rays of red and blue and yellow which are called his “arrows,” for the Huichol sun, like Phœbus Apollo, has arrows for rays.